


The Woman of My Dreams

by Perfidious_Albion



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate History, Gen, Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-27
Updated: 2018-12-27
Packaged: 2019-09-28 13:51:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 24,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17184197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Perfidious_Albion/pseuds/Perfidious_Albion
Summary: In the ash-strewn ruins of Summerhall, a prince is sent a dream of ice and sorcery. It is a different dream.The realm bleeds anyway.





	1. Dreams of Ruin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ranichi17](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ranichi17/gifts).



> Hello AO3! I posted this on another site but a friend asked me to put it here, so... well... here I am.

One day, slumbering in the ash-strewn ruins of Summerhall, a silver prince dreams of things to come. In one of his visions of possible futures he sees a red-haired boy born of a red-haired lady of the Trident, contending with mighty magics against a one-eyed shadow with monstrous tentacles and the powers of the dead that march from the far north, starlike blue eyes gleaming with ageless hate.  
  
Shaken, shuddering, Rhaegar Targaryen awakens… and concludes that clearly he must have seen Azor Ahai, the prince that was promised, the saviour of the world. And the mother of this prince whom he has seen is Catelyn Tully.  
  
Prince Rhaegar rides northward with all haste. At the advice of that damnable Spider, his mad father King Aerys has sent Uncle Steffon away to Volantis to find a bride of Valyrian blood within the black walls; but Rhaegar pays that little heed. A far more important goal has arisen. Others may not think so, but Rhaegar knows so. What do they know? Unlike him, they do not have the dragon-dreams that have plagued Rhaegar since he was a young boy, incessant, demanding, like a relentless drumming inside his head, ever urging him and warning him. Unlike him, they do not know what is coming.  
  
The prince’s party reaches Riverrun; and Rhaegar falls on one knee and proposes to Lady Catelyn for her hand in marriage.  
  
Lord Hoster Tully intended to betroth his eldest daughter to Brandon Stark, the heir to the largest of the Seven Kingdoms; but this stroke of luck upsets the applecart entirely. The Lord of Riverrun can scarcely believe his good fortune. Catelyn has taken something of a fancy to the handsome heir to Winterfell, but this is brushed aside by her lord father. At his instruction, she hurriedly accepts Prince Rhaegar’s proposal, and in a grand ceremony at Riverrun the two are wed.  
  
When Lord Steffon and Lady Cassana Baratheon die in one of Shipbreaker Bay’s infamous storms, within sight of their elder two sons standing at the top of the tower of Storm’s End, having sought a bride for Rhaegar, this does not endear the Prince of Dragonstone to Robert and Stannis Baratheon.  
  
Meanwhile, Rickard Stark, Lord of Winterfell—who has arranged a marriage alliance with Lord Hoster, only to have it thrown back in his face—is bitter and resentful of the Lord of Riverrun. Deciding that southrons are all treacherous, Lord Rickard abandons his plans for the south and, heeding the advice of his lady mother, retreats back to the north’s customary isolation.  
  
Prince Rhaegar lies with his pretty young wife upon their wedding night, and fathers a child, for Catelyn Targaryen _née_ Tully is fertile as well as dutiful. Outsiders remark on how devoted a husband the Prince of Dragonstone is, for he is rarely far from his lady wife’s side, ever careful and attentive. But the Princess of Dragonstone herself disagrees. For it seems to her that her husband’s care and heed are not for her, but only for the Targaryen heir that is growing in her belly.  
  
When her time comes, the Prince of Dragonstone paces impatiently outside the birthing chamber, eager to see the red-haired prince who will save the world, his Aegon Targaryen… and then he enters the room, and the midwife congratulates him on the birth of his daughter.  
  
Next time, Rhaegar tells himself. After all, Aegon was not the firstborn of the three siblings, either. Next time.  
  
The little girl, red of hair and blue of eye, is named Princess Visenya—though her mother often calls her Vis—and the Prince and Princess of Dragonstone lie with each other again.  
  
With a fertile wife producing children so quickly, Rhaegar’s position looks more assured. The prince gathers together the lords of the realm, without issuing some grand insult to any of them, and gains sufficient support to carry out a quiet seizure of power from his mad father, Aerys the Second of His Name. King Aerys resists, but the betrayal of some of his own Kingsguard, led by Rhaegar’s closest friend Ser Arthur Dayne, dooms the Mad King’s hopes of retaining power. Prince Rhaegar and the lords supporting him, backed by Tridentine knights, are able to secure the Red Keep and confine King Aerys to a comfortable, well-guarded tower. The Prince of Dragonstone becomes Prince Regent of the Seven Kingdoms.  
  
This state of affairs does not last long. Embarrassingly, the captive king is able to break a window and stab himself with a glass shard, in a final spiteful gesture to his son’s rule. Thus passes Aerys the Mad, and thereupon rises King Rhaegar the First of His Name.  
  
Rhaegar’s friend Lord Jon Connington of Griffin’s Roost is appointed as Hand of the King, replacing Aerys’s friend and Hand, Lord Tywin Lannister. This irritates Lord Jon’s liegelord, Robert Baratheon, and of course Lord Tywin is displeased; but it is even more to the displeasure of Lord Hoster, who feels passed over in spite of the great support that the knights of the Trident provided to Rhaegar’s seizure of power.  
  
Catelyn, Princess of Dragonstone, whose lack of Valyrian blood her goodfather King Aerys never much approved of, journeys from Dragonstone to King’s Landing to join her royal husband. When Aerys passes on, she becomes queen.  
  
Soon Queen Catelyn gives birth again. It is another girl, this time of her father’s look, with hair like moonlight and the violet eyes of Old Valyria. King Rhaegar names the babe as Princess Rhaenys Targaryen. He tells himself not to worry. Aegon was second-born of the three siblings, not third-born, but he did have two sisters. This is only fitting. The dragon must have three heads. Surely the prince that he saw in his dreams, the sorcerer and Other-slayer, the third head of the dragon, The prince that was promised, will come next.  
  
Next time the queen gives birth, it is another girl.  
  
King Rhaegar is furious and dismayed. Where is his prince? Where is the prince that was promised? Such is the king’s anger that he does not even deign to name his thirdborn daughter. Queen Catelyn gives her the name Minisa, and all the affection that her father will not.  
  
At once, the royal marriage becomes distant and cold. While Queen Catelyn dutifully raises her brood of three young Targaryen princesses, King Rhaegar secludes himself in his study, poring over old books. He no longer believes Catelyn will be the mother of the prince that was promised; he must have been mistaken in the way he interpreted that dragon-dream, almost a decade ago. Rhaegar gathers septons and lordlings and forgers and ambitious men, and he concludes that Catelyn must go, and he knows the way to do it. Ever after, a beautiful golden-haired lady is seen often in the king’s company, and the lord Hand, Jon Connington, is replaced with the formidable Lord Tywin Lannister.  
  
To the shock and horror of Lord Hoster and the queen, the king approaches the High Septon in the Great Sept of Baelor and commands that his marriage to the queen be annulled, on grounds of the queen’s evident failure to produce a male heir. Of course, the lack of a boy is blamed on the wife, not the husband.  
  
The queen and her family spring into action, using Tully gold to bestow generous gifts on septs across the realm. The High Septon is ordinarily a pliable man to the wishes of the aristocracy and the cosy, established order, but even for him, there are limits; he knows that the septons across the Seven Kingdoms will be up in arms if he allows this to occur. He protests and refuses to annul the marriage, expecting the king to back down on this unreasonable demand.  
  
The king does not back down. King Rhaegar accuses the High Septon of being bought by Tully gold. The High Septon denies it. King Rhaegar says that his marriage must then be deemed invalid, leaving him free to marry the Lady Cersei. The High Septon refuses; he will not, he says, “cast a torch upon the great edifice of the sanctity of marriage in the eyes of gods and men.”  
  
The Targaryen king has had enough of this defiance, and Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning, marches into the Great Sept of Baelor.  
  
Blood is spilt on the Great Sept’s floors. The High Septon is taken into custody in Maegor’s Holdfast. And a new High Septon hurriedly condones the marriage of King Rhaegar and his latest wife.


	2. In the Court of the Whoremonger King

The capricious and tumultuous marital matters of King Rhaegar, the titled Protector of the Realm, send shockwaves rumbling through the realm in their wake.

After Queen Catelyn is put aside, Riverrun looks for allies, but finds few. Lord Tully’s previous breaking of his word to Lord Stark has come with consequences. Although many lesser Houses and common folk are sympathetic to the mistreated queen, House Tully cut its closest link to the other Great Houses when it accepted what seemed like a stroke of good fortune: the Prince of Dragonstone and heir to the entire Seven Kingdoms, seeking a Tully bride. Now House Tully is despised by Houses Baratheon and Stark, treated as a dangerous rival by the Lannisters who have displaced Queen Catelyn in the king’s bed, and regarded with, at best, indifference by the other Great Houses. Many of the lesser Houses are sympathetic, especially in the Vale of Arryn and the Reach, where the river of piety flows deep; but House Arryn and House Tyrell do not countenance an uprising, and, without firm support, the offended Houses are not willing to take the risk of rising up against the king.

Much of the realm may think that they are in the right; but the insulted queen and her family stand alone.

Disgraced and dishonoured, Queen Catelyn raises her daughters Visenya (known among her family as ‘Vis’), Rhaenys and Minisa in Riverrun with what quiet dignity she can. Her lord father’s bannermen treat them as princesses even if the rest of the realm will not. It is Queen Cersei’s daughters—whom Rhaegar has insisted on naming Rhaenys and Visenya—who are treated as princesses by the king, and eligible young men from across the Seven Kingdoms come to pay court and compliments to them. Vis, the elder Rhaenys, and Minisa are treated as bastards by their royal father, who regards his entire marriage to Catelyn Tully as an embarrassing misinterpretation of prophecy that he would be pleased to forget. Although sympathies with House Tully’s plight are not uncommon, it is widely known that the king and his new family will not regard a House with any favour for marrying into the inconvenient previous family which he wishes did not exist; and so a marriage to Catelyn’s daughters would not bring the benefits a royal marriage usually would.

King Rhaegar’s first marriage came with the breaking of the betrothal between Catelyn Tully, eldest daughter of the Lord Paramount of the Trident, and Brandon Stark, eldest son of the Warden of the North. Rickard, Lord of Winterfell, who took steps uncharacteristic for his familyin attempting to reach out to the other kingdoms and establish allies there, was surprised and embittered by House Tully’s last-moment rejection of his suit due to the prince’s proposal. Stung, he withdrew back towards the aforesaid traditional policy of isolationism, and listened more to the counsel of his wife, Lady Lyarra Stark, who warned him especially of the threat posed by bastard lines and regarded ‘southrons’ as treacherous by nature. Fearful of another late rejection that would bring shame upon the Stark name and humiliate House Stark in the eyes of lords in north and south alike, Lord Rickard denied the request of Lord Robert Baratheon to wed his daughter, out of hand. Lyanna of House Stark weds Jon of House Umber, the heir to Last Hearth—who is known, despite being a tremendously large man, as ‘the Smalljon’—with whom she has a daughter. Her three brothers marry northern noblewomen, such as the eldest, Brandon, with pious Sybelle Locke, and the middle brother Eddard with beautiful Barbrey Ryswell. As is traditional, when they reach sufficient age, Lord Rickard provides the younger two of his three sons with seats of their own, in the vicinity of Winterfell, as they will not inherit after him.

The young Lord of Storm’s End is upset at the denial of his suit, which he has been preparing for quite some time and which his close friend Eddard Stark—who believed he knew his lord father’s instincts on the matter of alliances—assured him was likely to succeed. When Lord Rickard recalls his son Eddard from fosterage at the Eyrie to Winterfell, Lord Robert is further upset. He soon returns to Storm’s End, finding the Eyrie a dull and lifeless place without his ‘Ned’ to share it with. Robert enters a loveless marriage with Lady Alla Penrose, daughter of one of his lords bannermen, chosen, it is said, for being comely. He gives almost no heed to the tedious business of mediating between his vassals. Therefore government of the stormlands is, in practice, placed upon the shoulders of his younger brother, Ser Stannis Baratheon, who begrudgingly takes up all the real work while Robert feasts, drinks and whores himself away into an early grave.

The unfortunate Lady Alla Baratheon, pretty maiden turned neglected and battered wife, turns to the gods for solace. Word of the ill-treatment of the beautiful Lady of Storm’s End spreads throughout the stormlands. Robert, once a smiling young man who won friends with ease, has become an angry, depressed, fat old drunkard, veering between fury and passion and apathy, and always blaming House Tully, Lord Rickard Stark and then-Prince Rhaegar for taking away from him the only things he truly wanted in his life. By this means, his talent for winning the love of his followers has largely deserted him. The sympathy of the stormlords turns to Lady Alla, spurred in great part by her loving lord father and her brother Ser Cortnay Penrose. So does the sympathy of the septon of Storm’s End, and, afterwards, the Faith of the Seven more broadly. In the reign of King Rhaegar, many of the Faithful come to regard Robert Baratheon as a man quite like Rhaegar Targaryen: a man who epitomises the godless, lustful womanising that is everything wrong with the realm nowadays.

After both of his young wards leave him before their time, Jon Arryn, the Lord of the Eyrie, remains in his mountain home, brooding. In their stay, they have become like sons to him, childless as he is. The departure of them both cuts him deep. Lord Jon takes to wandering his high stone halls alone. One cool, crisp winter’s day, he is found in his bed and does not awaken. Some whisper his heir, now Lord Elbert Arryn, has grown impatient with the old lord’s tardiness in clearing the way for him. Others say it was nothing more suspicious than old age and a broken heart.

Whatever plans Lord Jon may have had for the future of the Vale, Lord Elbert’s plans are different. Shortly after his accession to the Falcon Throne—formally the ‘high seat’ of the Arryn lords, not a throne any more, but memories are long in the Vale, and men still recall the older name—Lord Elbert weds Lady Mina of Highgarden, the sister of Lord Mace Tyrell. The coveted Arryn name, the oldest and most prestigious line of Andal nobility in Westeros, grants legitimacy to the Tyrells, whose detractors still name them upjumped stewards, while the wealth and bounty of the Reach flow into the Vale.

In time, Lord Elbert and Lady Mina Arryn and her brother the Lord of Highgarden, perceiving the tarnish that has come upon all of King Rhaegar’s reign, conceive within their thought the notion to replace him, not with any of Rhaegar’s brood by the various queens—highborn ladies turned to whores by Rhaegar’s infidelity—but with Prince Viserys. The king’s brother is young and pious and pliable… and of close enough age to wed Aemma, the meaningfully named half-Tyrell daughter of the Lord and Lady of the Eyrie.

With their long, proud heritage as Andal lords and patrons of the Faith, words from the Arryns of the Eyrie are listened to among the Most Devout; and the Tyrells of Highgarden, who lack such a history but are bound by marriage and solemn oaths to the Hightowers of Oldtown, are not without influence either. Slowly and quietly, taking the utmost care not to have their deeds traced back to them by the king, the Lords of the Eyrie and Highgarden send out men to rile up the Faithful common folk of most of Westeros, filling their ears with invective against the ‘Whore Queens’ and the ‘Whoremonger King’ Rhaegar. The king—who has had no able master of whisperers since he banished the perfumed Essosi Varys, a favourite of his late father’s, when he came to the throne—is unaware of the link between these angry street preachers and their financial supporters in the Eyrie and Highgarden. It should be a smooth ascent to the crown: remove the Whoremonger King and a polite, kindly young man will surely be welcomed by the realm after Rhaegar’s debauchery.

Now that King Aerys has died in the custody of his own son and the Prince Regent has ascended to the Iron Throne, the younger of the two princes is in a difficult position. With his royal father, whom he loved (for he was shielded from his father’s worst excesses by his mother), dead and his elder brother in power, little Viserys Targaryen retreats into the comfort of the Faith. In this he is encouraged by his highly religious mother, Dowager Queen Rhaella. The Faith, struggling under a High Septon imposed by King Rhaegar who is widely viewed as a false High Septon, soon comes to adore the pious young prince. In him lie the hopes of many of those who dislike his brother’s rule. Across Westeros, men say openly in taverns that, just as they smallfolk must heed the king, the king must heed the gods, yet King Rhaegar has forgotten the gods and heeds nothing but his own lusts for any woman’s flesh that crosses his path. The man who was once compared to Aemon the Dragonknight is now spoken of as Aegon the Unworthy come again.

Not even the Kingsguard, once highly respected, are immune to the aura of disgust and contempt that is associated with the king, due to Ser Arthur Dayne’s arrest of the former High Septon, who has languished in a cell in Maegor’s Holdfast for years. Embarrassingly, when Ser Gerold Hightower passed away in his sleep, there are a tenth as many volunteers to join the brotherhood of the White Swords than there were before King Rhaegar took the crown.

And for what?

For his troubles, King Rhaegar has obtained what he long sought. Queen Cersei has given him what Queen Catelyn did not: a son. But this victory tastes hollow to the king, for he is never fond of Aegon, Prince of Dragonstone. Truth be told, few people are. Prince Aegon is a cruel little boy; a light shines in his eyes when he watches moths fly into the flame or pulls the legs off spiders. He displays no interest when King Rhaegar attempts to show him old scrolls and teach him legends of the Others and how the Last Hero defeated them. The disappointed king has a niggling suspicion that he cannot quite place, deeming that the son Queen Cersei has given him does not seem to be much like the rest of his family. How can such a boy be the prince that was promised?

Quietly, secretly, as he did with Catelyn Tully more than ten years ago, King Rhaegar investigates the notion of putting aside his wife.

What he uncovers is alarming. Lord Jon Connington of Griffin’s Roost, the king’s former Hand and close friend, comes to him saying that he sent serving maids to the queen’s chambers while she was being guarded by young Ser Jaime, to watch her and see anything she might be plotting, as the king instructed him. And Ser Jaime was not in the doorway. Ser Jaime was in the queen.

After this, events move quickly. Rhaegar sends forth his closest friend, Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning and lately Lord Commander of the Kingsguard since Ser Gerold Hightower’s passing, to place the queen under arrest. Lannister guards, unknowing that they have any cause for alarm, do not prevent Ser Arthur’s passage. Ser Jaime slays four men before he is taken captive. The only men who know of the plot are those who are trusted by King Rhaegar and his Kingsguard. By the time Lord Tywin’s retainers in King’s Landing know that aught is amiss, Lord Tywin’s golden twins are locked in comfortable but separate tower-cells. When they do know, they are too badly outnumbered by Rhaegar’s gold-cloaks to dare fight back. The next day, it is announced that Queen Cersei has been put aside.

With the acquiescence of his pet High Septon, King Rhaegar marries Jeyne Chelsted, a red-haired crownlander girl of four-and-ten, while he has nearly thrice her years. The young queen proves fertile, and soon grows great with child. Before he is even born, King Rhaegar guesses it will be a boy, and names him Aegon. He is remembered as Little Aegon, compared to his brother Aegon of the Rock. Meanwhile, Lord Tywin sends a company of retainers (not himself, out of fear for his person) to King’s Landing, to protest the setting aside of his daughter, only to discover that he has even worse to worry about. Queen Cersei is being put on trial, for high treason.

The westerlands’ representatives argue well, but Rhaegar and a court of crownlanders, seeing opportunity for advancement in the king’s marriage to one of their own, dismiss all of their arguments. Cersei Targaryen, her brother and her children, proclaimed to be abominations, are condemned to death.

The reclusive King Rhaegar himself emerges from the Red Keep, blinking in the light, to read out the list of charges for the Lannister family. His wife stands, pale and golden and lovely, with the utmost dignity, next to her brother and her three children. When King Rhaegar names them ‘bastard abominations born of incest’, little silver-haired Rhaenys and golden-haired Visenya and their brother Aegon weep, red-faced and trembling, in their mother’s arms, in the sight of hundreds of thousands of cityfolk. Queen Cersei is accused of fornicating with her own twin brother, cuckolding the king, and conspiring to illicitly rob the Iron Throne from the royal House Targaryen. Each of the charges, alone, merits death. Together, there can be no doubt.

The king reads out the death-sentence.

The cityfolk erupt with a bestial cry of contempt and hate. Rhaegar’s headsman never reaches the queen. The gold-cloaks are stunned by the ferocity and suddenness with which jeering turns to murder. Hundreds of them are killed where they stand, buried under a landslide of men and women who have seen their king spit on the Faith of the Seven and spit on common decency, one time too many.

A common cutpurse’s knife puts an end to the Sword of the Morning, and the king himself disappears under a pile of writhing rioters. He does not emerge. The largest piece of him they find, afterwards, is a little finger—from the look of it, ripped out while he was still alive.

Gold-cloaks and the king’s knights draw their swords and hack their way through the mob of outraged cityfolk. Corpses litter the streets. By the end of the day, they have restored order, suppressing the riot of the Faithful, and Jeyne Targaryen, protected in the tumult by Ser Barristan Selmy of the Kingsguard, takes power as Queen Regent of the Seven Kingdoms, presiding over a mutinous city on behalf of Little Aegon, the red-haired babe who will emerge from her womb moons later. The crownlands are in the Queen Regent’s hands, aided by Jon Connington, Myles Mooton and others of Rhaegar’s friends who remained loyal to him no matter what. But Cersei Targaryen and Jaime Lannister are gone, escaped in the chaos. And so are Cersei’s children.

Aegon of the Rock, his sisters and their mother, guarded by Ser Jaime Lannister, steal a fishing boat and reach Dragonstone. There Aegon, Prince of Dragonstone, is received with splendour. In events that doubtless have nothing whatsoever to do with Princess Rhaenys’s wedding to Monterys Velaryon, heir to Driftmark, and Cersei’s own hastily-arranged wedding to the widower Lord Ardrian Celtigar of Claw Isle, the lords of the Narrow Sea declare for Aegon of the Rock.

Lord Tywin Lannister declares his grandson to be the rightful king, and calls on all true men to declare their loyalty. Yet he is not alone in that. Sensing opportunity, thanks to the division of his foes, Hoster Tully the Lord of Riverrun denounces Aegon of the Rock and Little Aegon as bastards, on the grounds that Rhaegar wedded Cersei Lannister and Jeyne Chelsted while his wife was still alive. Visenya Targaryen of Riverrun, called ‘Vis’—the first-born of Rhaegar’s seven children, not to be confused with the sixth-born, Visenya Targaryen of the Rock—is crowned in her lord grandfather’s halls as Queen of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, Lady of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm. Alone of Rhaegar’s children, she is old enough to reign without a regent. The knights of the Trident come rushing to fight for their red-haired river-queen.

For the conspirators who plotted King Rhaegar’s death, everything has gone wrong. Oh, certainly Rhaegar was meant to die; but it was not supposed to happen like this. It was meant to be after the execution. Queen Cersei and Aegon of the Rock were not meant to survive. Then it would be their own claimant, Prince Viserys, married to Aemma Arryn, against King Rhaegar and Little Aegon with the enmity of all the realm against them. The Lannisters would rally to their banner, and the Tullys, without such a favourable situation, would not have felt confident enough to declare on their own. But Rhaegar has died too quickly. They encouraged septons to preach against the king, and stirred up dissent among the smallfolk of Westeros, and poured silver into every hand that meant to rise against King Rhaegar; and Rhaegar is so hated that their efforts have succeeded more quickly than they intended. Now Rhaegar is dead in uncontrolled circumstances. Instead of the war they wanted—Viserys against Rhaegar and Little Aegon, with all the realm outside the crownlands rallying to overthrow the ‘Whoremonger King’—to crush a dragon that offended the Seven Kingdoms and install a better one in its place, they have cut off the head of the dragon and now they find its leaderless limbs flailing with deadly claws in all directions.

Still, for Lady Mina Arryn and her brother and husband, the matter is not entirely unsalvageable. They still possess two of the richer and more powerful of the Seven Kingdoms, all the glittering hosts of knights of the Vale and the Reach, and their enemies are not united against them. Moreover, the Faith is thoroughly on their side. Septons across the Seven Kingdoms preach the virtues of Viserys, a clean fresh start to wipe away the lust and lechery of Rhaegar the Whoremonger King and his spawn. Surrounded by Arryn swords, Viserys flees from the chaos in King’s Landing to Highgarden, and there he dons a golden crown amidst columns of steel so vast that they stretch beyond the horizon.

Yet even that is not the end of it.

Over the years, the bitter, depressed Lord of Storm’s End has come to hate septons, because they frequently take the side of his pious and ill-treated wife, Lady Alla Baratheon, against himself. In Lord Robert’s view, the Faith has got uppity, questioning the deeds of lords and threatening them when they are above its station, and septons need to be reminded of their place. Moreover, Robert loathes House Tully and House Targaryen with a fiery passion, for ruining his hopes of marrying Lyanna Stark. Replacing one Targaryen with another will never be enough for him.

Lord Quellon Greyjoy is not a happy man. His wife, Gysella Sunderly—daughter of a deeply traditional ironborn lord whom he wedded in order to placate the adherents of the Old Way, for he could not become lord and then lock them out of power without any concessions, else they would surely overthrow him—has recently died of the plague. That does not pain him much, but Lord Quellon is saddened by the death of his favourite son, who died in a shipwreck. That is a pity, the Lord of the Iron Islands feels, for he liked Euron much more than any of his other sons. Euron was a much more thoughtful lad, much less in thrall to his mother’s tales of driftwood crowns and Qhored the Cruel and old empires and the Old Way’s glory than his brothers were. Lord Quellon views his heir, Balon, with barely veiled contempt, and fears that the ironborn will be imperilled when Balon takes the Seastone Chair.

The ironborn have no love for Rhaegar Targaryen or his children; yet they are also wary of the Faith, which they perceive as the power behind the throne of King Viserys. And Lord Quellon is more open to alliances than most ironmen. He forges an accord with Lord Robert, or rather King Robert, for so he proclaims himself: a Baratheon, as Lord of the Seven Kingdoms.

Dorne and the north remain neutral throughout the whole war. Elia Martell has wedded a Dornish lord, one of her princely brother’s bannermen, after promising discussions of a possible betrothal with Baelor Hightower were abruptly ended by House Martell, for unspecified reasons.

Rhaegar Targaryen’s three queens have seven children, and all three queens claim the right to follow him upon the Iron Throne.

Jeyne Targaryen, the Queen Regent in King’s Landing, faces no fewer than four pretenders to Little Aegon’s crown. Aegon of the Rock rests upon Dragonstone, gathering ships, while his lord grandfather gathers armies in the west to throw aside his foes and win him his crown. Queen Vis sits enthroned in a red stone hall as the knights of the Trident shed blood in her name, all seeking to prove their valour by great feats of arms to draw the eye and win the heart of their fair young queen. Robert Baratheon, older and bitterer than he once was, leads the stormlords out from their wind-swept home, questing for Targaryen blood, while the ironborn plague the western shore, nominally at Robert’s command. And at Highgarden and the Eyrie the banners flutter beyond counting, knights and septons and common men flocking to join the handsome Prince Viserys and dethrone all of Rhaegar’s brood.

The schemers in Highgarden and the Eyrie meant for Prince Viserys and his half-Arryn, half-Tyrell bride to have a smooth ascent to the crown, once it was removed forcibly from Rhaegar the Whoremonger’s head. Yet there are matters they did not foresee. And now a dread spectre arises that can only be sated by the blood of millions. The carrion-crows amass in black clouds of beating wings, and over Westeros descends the shadow of war.


	3. The Realm Inflamed

When enraged smallfolk rip King Rhaegar to bloody pieces and the fires of war devour Westeros, Queen Vis, his first daughter and eldest child, gathers the knights of the Trident and sends them forth in three directions.

The queen’s fastest knights in the eastern riverlands ride eastward with all haste, not even coming to muster at Riverrun, for the hall of the lord Hand Hoster Tully is too far to the west and time is of the essence. As soon as they arrive, they set up their positions in the narrow, jagged, rocky passes through the Mountains of the Moon, laying stakes and caltrops and awaiting the footmen who are following them. Those passes are ill-suited to the passage of armies, at the best of times. With an army blocking them, they are even less so. There are indecisive skirmishes, but to the immense frustration of the Valemen, they prove unable to break through.

Throughout Westerosi history, the riverlands have often been occupied by foreign powers, and to conquer the riverlands a foreign power must be large and aggressive, such as the greater stormlands in the era of Arlan. The towering Mountains of the Moon, with their harsh and treacherous terrain, are often said to protect the Vale from invasions coming from the riverlands. But they can also be said to protect the riverlands from invasions coming from the Vale.

A smaller force of Lord Hoster’s knights and footmen head westward, to block the pass of the Golden Tooth. They, too, do not attack. This force is to prevent the westermen from breaking through into the riverlands, though the westermen have their own concerns elsewhere.

Yet neither of these is the main thrust. The bulk of Queen Vis’s strength comes crashing on iron-shod hooves into the crownlands.

The crownlander lords—alone, friendless in Westeros—fall back in terror and tears before the mailed fist of the Trident. Jeyne Targaryen born Chelsted, the Queen Regent, sends frantic messages by raven to Riverrun, offering alliance, even proposing to betroth her son Little Aegon to both Vis and her middle sister Rhaenys of Riverrun, for no-one questions the legitimacy of Queen Catelyn’s children as truly Rhaegar’s, and, as her royal husband told her, the dragon must have three heads. In Riverrun Dowager Queen Catelyn does not dignify this suggestion with a reply. She has heard quite enough of her late and unlamented husband’s madness. By her telling, and her lord father’s, and her queenly daughter’s, Rhaegar only ever had one true wife. Polygamy is a sin in the eyes of the Seven; Rhaegar Targaryen’s marriages to Cersei Lannister and Jeyne Chelsted, while Catelyn still lived, have no legal weight. Little Aegon is a bastard, like his Lannister-born half-siblings. And in any case, she will not give up two of her daughters to be incestuous brides of a babe.

For all their righteousness or lack thereof, the crownlander lords are tenacious. They have not had one of their own as queen for some time, and they will fight for Little Aegon and his Chelsted mother. The rivermen have greater strength in numbers, but some are encamped in the passes of the western mountains and the Mountains of the Moon, hundreds of miles away, so that advantage is diminished. Lord Hoster carves his way through a sea of crownlander swords, but it takes time.

That is the tale of the riverlands, early in the war. But most of the blood that spills over Westeros’s soil is shed in the Reach.

The host in gleaming steel that King Viserys III and Lord Mace Tyrell have amassed at Highgarden is certainly formidable; only a fool would say elsewise. But whereas the plotters hoped that Viserys would be the only viable choice against Little Aegon, that has proven not to be so. And so, instead of gathering the allegiance of all the many who oppose Rhaegar’s continued rule, Viserys’s strength breeds fear, and fear breeds enemies. Other claimants, wary of the threat Viserys poses to their various ambitions, determine that he must be defeated.

The ageing lord-proclaimed-king Robert Baratheon, now immensely fat and black-of-mood more oft than not, rages against Viserys III as the Faith’s favoured candidate. Uppity smallfolk must be put back in their place, the king in Storm’s End declares to his bannermen, and he is the man to do it. His Greyjoy allies, who are as wary of the Faith as he is, agree; and Lord Quellon’s sons are eager to strike against the Reachlords whom they sneeringly dismiss as the epitome of weak, soft ‘green landers’. Meanwhile, Lord Tywin Lannister’s cool green-and-gold eyes survey Westeros and soon fall upon the alliance of the Vale and the Reach. Lord Mace, he determines, must be swiftly crushed if his grandson, Aegon of the Rock, is ever to sit the Iron Throne of his father.

Therefore the Reach is assailed on almost every side. From the east, stormlanders rampage out of the kingswood and the marches as King Robert bellows his challenge to the line of the dragon-kings. From the north, line after line of lockstep-marching red-cloaked men in lion-crafted halfhelms appear on the horizon, hefting spears and swords beneath the red-and-golden banners of House Lannister. Upon the west the ironborn descend like locusts. Only House Martell, on the Reach’s southern frontier, does not attack, but the Dornishmen are no friends to Viserys; they are vultures, sitting out Westeros’s battle in the hope to feast on Westeros’s corpse.

The green, low-lying hills between the Reach and the westerlands are so shallow that their people are not even required to herd sheep in the stead of cattle. They are little obstacle to an army. Two great hosts of westermen—one led by Lord Tywin, the other by his brother Ser Kevan—emerge from those hills, the former at Silverhill, the latter along the oceanroad. The oceanroad is a swifter path. Ser Kevan Lannister emerges first. Through careful usage of false campfires and excessive tents (for the Lannisters have no lack of gold to buy them) the Tyrell commander at the scene, Ser Garland Oakheart, is induced to falsely conclude that this must be the main strength of the Lannister assault. Lord Mathis Rowan, correspondingly, sends men to the west… and is taken unawares by the immensity of the Lannister host that falls upon him.

To his credit, Lord Mathis reacts well, and is able to extract the greater part of his army from Lord Tywin’s trap. But the losses are terrible. Lord Mathis falls back, demanding reinforcements; but from where will the reinforcements come?

At the beginning of the war, Lord Quellon seizes the Shield Islands in a swift bold stroke, then dispatches the main strength of his warfleet to the Arbour. Lord Paxter Redwyne, eager for glory, rushes out to meet him. The ironborn, having arrogantly expected the ‘green landers’ to provide them with no real opposition, are taken aback by the glorious might of House Redwyne and forced to flee… or so Paxter Redwyne is led to believe. In truth, Lord Quellon and his sons lead the Redwyne fleet around on a merry chase all the way around the Arbour’s coast, while Lord Quellon’s eldest grandson Rodrik Greyjoy leads a fleet of small, less warlike, less imposing, seized merchant-ships, based at the Shield Islands. These ships, each of them carrying ironborn soldiers quietly cross the small distance from the Shield Islands to the coast of the mainland Reach, west of Brightwater Keep—a few at a time, always at night, never enough to draw great alarm if they happen to be spotted—again, and again, and again.

By the time Lord Paxter realises that he has been fooled, a whole army has made the crossing.

Worse, the Reach begins its usual habit in major conflicts: splintering. With an ironborn army at his doorstep, Alester Florent, Lord of Brightwater, proves less than eager to die for the royal ambitions of Mace Tyrell. Lord Alester happily betrays his liegelord, in return for being promised by Lord Quellon—on behalf of his ally, King Robert Baratheon—that House Florent will be granted overlordship of the Reach when the war is won. (Albeit a rather reduced Reach. Lord Quellon does not mean to fight a war and not gain anything from it.) Together, the ironborn-Florent army suddenly presents a big enough obstacle to cut off House Hightower’s many rich and powerful vassals from Highgarden. They pay Highgarden little heed. They will march there later, Alester Florent is assured, but Quellon Greyjoy has the greater army; it is he who holds command. And Quellon has his eye on a juicy plum: Oldtown.

House Hightower calls for reinforcements from Highgarden, just as House Rowan does; but Highgarden has troubles of its own. The capital of the Reach and current seat of King Viserys III is distressingly close to the border of the stormlands. That is one of the things Mace Tyrell has an ambition to change; but before he can do that, he has to throw out the angry stormlanders whose muddy boots are all over his kingdom.

The folk of the warm, flat, fertile plains of the eastern Reach do not know the forests of the kingswood and the rainwood or the mountains of the marches, as the stormlanders do. They cannot tell where a stormlander host will emerge until it emerges. Grassy Vale and Ashford fall almost at once to King Robert Baratheon’s men after the Great Muster of Summerhall. Ser Renly Baratheon’s host advances from Grassy Vale to claim Longtable and Bitterbridge, raping, pillaging and burning the lands along the river Blueburn. Ser Renly, youngest brother of King Robert, soon becomes a figure of hatred in the Reach. “The more peasants we drive from their homes,” he is recorded to have said, “the more they have to feed. What does it matter to us if Reach smallfolk starve?” The middle Baratheon brother, Ser Stannis, marches with a smaller host in a more orderly manner on the north and south banks of the river Cockleswent, closing in on Cider Hall. (Robert has not yet granted his brothers lands and lordships of their own because he means for both of them to become great lords; he intends to make the decision of which lands to grant them later in the war, once it has become clear which of the Seven Kingdoms will bend the knee to him and which will resist to the bitter end.) Fossoway troops, red apple and green apple alike, meet him in several days of battle, and it seems that their victory is all but certain… until King Robert himself comes charging up from Nightsong, crosses the river behind the Reachmen host and breaks the Fossoways as between a hammer and an anvil. The rout is nigh total. The songs have it that the elder two of the Baratheon brothers embraced each other on a field of bloody Reachmen bodies. The truth is that they saw each other, scowled and walked away.

With Lord Tywin and Ser Kevan leading nearly forty-thousand men into his kingdom, Mace Tyrell decides that the Lannisters are an urgent threat that he himself must march to meet. But the Baratheons cannot be left alone; the enemy advance in the east is less pressing than in the north, but not by much. King Viserys Targaryen, having heard of the butchery of many of his smallfolk, declares that he will lead the counter-attack against the Baratheons himself, to defend his people. This he does, though Lord Mace is reluctant to consent to it. The Arryn swordsmen who escorted their young king in the flight from King’s Landing when Rhaegar died come with him, as do thousands of Tyrell men-at-arms.

With Mace’s march, Lord Tywin Lannister now faces the brunt of the Reach’s tremendous power. His solution is as clever as it is cruel. He presses Lord Mathis Rowan’s thinned army hard, driving southward at great pace, forcing the Reachmen on a costly retreat that lets him slay many stragglers. This seems foolish, for he is coming closer to Lord Mace. But Lord Tywin is aware of this. It is on purpose that he chose not to try to prevent the Rowan, Oakheart and Tyrell hosts from joining together; he decided this was not feasible. Instead, he reduces the Rowan host as much as he can, pressing onward; Ser Kevan does the same to the beleaguered Ser Garland Oakheart. The westermen forage whatever they can take and burn whatever they cannot. The hosts of Reachmen against him are indeed able to join together; and as soon as this happens, Lord Tywin begins the retreat, luring the Reachmen northwards, back into the westerlands. His army is stuffed with stolen food. The Reachmen, unwilling to act in their own land as brutally as Lord Tywin has just done, are not. What ensues is a long march back towards the westerlands, while the Reachmen grow thin and weary, and Reachmen’s hearts sink with dismay at the blackened ruin that the westermen have made of their once-fair kingdom.

Once he judges his foe to have been reduced enough, Lord Tywin strikes. The westermen have lured the Reachmen into a valley in the southern westerlands near Silverhill, land that they know best. There the Tyrell host is enclosed. The Lannister host falls upon it from both ends of the valley, one side led by Lord Tywin, the other by his brother Ser Kevan.

What follows—the Battle of Churnbrook Valley—is as a nightmare made flesh and blood.

Thousands upon thousands of men on both sides are fed into a hail of arrows and sea of churning swords. When it is over, the Tyrell host has ceased to exist as an organised force, though many thousands of survivors have fled in chaos over the hills. The butcher’s bill on both sides is horrendous beyond belief. For House Lannister, it is a victory dearly bought, but it is certainly a victory.

The westermen spend the next few weeks hunting down Reachman survivors and riding them down without mercy. Afterwards, the Lord of Casterly Rock and his host march in triumph back into the Reach, though it is a colder, hungrier march than the previous way.

Meanwhile, another host of Reachmen confronts the invading army of King Robert Baratheon. This army is led by King Viserys Targaryen himself. The two claimants to the Iron Throne who are intent on disinheriting all of Rhaegar’s children—kin, second cousins, men who might in another world have been friends—meet in battle to the south of the Cockleswent. King Viserys III’s main subordinate commander is Randyll Tarly, Lord of Horn Hill, whose own lands are threatened by Robert’s advance; King Robert I’s main subordinate commander is his brother Ser Stannis Baratheon.

The two hosts meet; and in a well-placed charge, boldly led by Viserys himself, the knights of the Reach turn the stormlanders’ left flank and put them to flight.

With vengeance in his eyes, King Viserys III pursues his defeated enemies. The Baratheon army retreats northeastwards, as if heading for Storm’s End, but it does not fall apart. For King Robert has been revived by war. He has smiled and laughed more in the past year than in the previous ten years. He eats less, drinks less, fucks less, now that he is no longer doing those things simply in order to distract himself from everything else in his life; he still does those things, but not to the exclusion of all else. He is generous with captured castles, gifting them at a whim to his lords bannermen; he praises their skill and sits around their campfires and toasts their courage at feasts with good cheer. House Penrose is irreconcilably against him, for the treatment of his wife Alla Baratheon, who was born into that House; but for others, once-begrudging allegiance to Storm’s End has become whole-hearted again. There is nothing the stormlords respect more than a warrior-king, and whatever else can be said of him, Robert Baratheon proves that he excels at that.

Though outnumbered by King Viserys’s host, King Robert barely keeps his army in good order as he wages a fighting retreat northeastward in the Reach, sorely beset by the columns of steel that march behind Viserys. The most perilous part of the flight ends when a bedraggled messenger from the northwestern Reach arrives at the camp of Viserys’s host, informing his king of Lord Mace’s death and defeat in the Battle of Churnbrook Valley. At the hour of victory, the dragon-king is forced to turn away, to hold back the advancing westermen. Viserys Targaryen himself departs along with ten-thousand men of his host, in an attempt to find and rally survivors of the battle. Lord Randyll Tarly is left in command. Viserys dislikes this, but he feels he has no choice; he must prevent the Reach’s northern front from utterly collapsing against the Lannister invaders, else he may defeat the rebel Lord Robert only to find the rebel Lord Tywin having stolen the heart of the Reach behind his back.

With these men leaving, and with the arrival of Ser Renly Baratheon’s host now that it has finished subjugating the lands of the northeastern Reach north of the Blueburn, it is the Baratheon army that has the numbers, not its Targaryen foe. Moreover, the departure of Viserys Targaryen restores morale to the stormlanders, for the feared dragon-king who defeated Robert Baratheon in battle is no longer leading their enemies.

By this time, the two armies—the defeated stormlanders retreating from King Viserys III’s advancing host—have almost reached the Blueburn. Therefore it is a swift affair for Viserys to cross the Mander and approach Goldengrove, where many of the survivors of Lord Mace’s broken host have gathered. He heads out north, seeking other survivors; but the Lannisters have been systematically seeking them out and hunting them down. There are few to find.

With what army he can scrounge, with grim resolve, Viserys Targaryen faces down the larger Lannister host.

The westermen bear down upon the Targaryen army and strike it like a hammer. The Reachmen tremble, and falter, but they do not break. Four times the Lannisters try to break through, incurring casualties, and four times they hold.

At last the dragon-king leads a great knightly charge, like the one that defeated Robert Baratheon, seeking to turn the right flank of Lord Tywin’s hungry, tired army. It works. The Lannisters are in disarray, their flank is panicking…

…and then the king falls from his horse.

A great groan of despair arises from the Reachmen. The iron will behind the charge softens. Viserys’s fall is death to their hopes. With their confidence broken, as the bold young king whom they are fighting for lies bleeding in the dirt, the Reachmen’s charge loses some of its power—not all, but enough. What would have been the killing blow does not quite bite far enough.

The westermen rally, and the knights of the Reach perish at pike-point, and eventually the army that fought for King Viserys Targaryen is put to rout.

Randyll Tarly fights bravely and well, but not well enough to stop Robert from slaying him with a great spiked warhammer when they encounter each other on the field. His blundering successor Ser Garlan Tyrell—a great warrior but a poor general—leads his host to be mowed down by stormlander longbowmen on the mud after a rainy day, well before Viserys’s death.

The remnants of the Reach fall to the two conquerors. King Robert Baratheon marches westward, past even Highgarden. He joins with the host of Lord Alester Florent, the latter of whom is now his Lord of Highgarden and Lord Paramount of the Mander. Lord Alester’s two-thousand Florent men set up camp outside Highgarden, which remains defiant, held by the last of the strength of House Tyrell. Quellon Greyjoy is still busy fighting House Hightower and its vassals; the Redwyne fleet has been sunk by the ironborn, and the men of the Arbour are stuck on their island, unable to do anything but watch the mainland and fume in powerless rage. To secure control over the rest of the Reach, Robert separates his host. King Robert stays in the far south, crossing the Mander, while his brother Ser Stannis is sent to take the less glorious role of marching northeast, back the way he came, to prevent the stormlanders’ conquests in the Reach east of the river Mander from falling easily to the westermen.

Thus the forces of House Baratheon are arranged against House Lannister, which divides its forces and seeks to take control of much of the northwestern Reach. The Baratheons hold the greater part of the Reach, while Lannister control stretches not much further than Goldengrove and Old Oak. The border between them is, in all places, at least afew dozen miles on the northwest side of the Mander. Lord Tywin’s strategy, though ultimately successful against House Tyrell, did involve a retreat that cost House Lannister a lot of ground in the Reach.

There are some negotiations. They are short. King Robert will not cast aside his crown, while Lord Tywin will not dismiss the claim of his grandchildren, born of his daughter Cersei and the late King Rhaegar. Soon, over the still-warm corpse of House Tyrell, the lion and the stag are making war.

While the Reach burns in the fires of war, the lords of the Narrow Sea put their strength, such as it is, to the service of Aegon of the Rock. Cersei and Aegon of the Rock bear a particular grudge against Little Aegon and his mother Jeyne Targaryen born Chelsted, the Queen Regent of the Seven Kingdoms, for the plots that led to Queen Cersei put aside by her husband, replaced in the king’s bed by “that Chelsted whore”, and almost executed. They harass all shipping that seeks King’s Landing, attempting to starve the city of grain and coin that could come from across the Narrow Sea. Moreover, they keep the Vale’s small fleet confined to port in Gulltown, prowling the waters hoping for the Valemen to come out and be slaughtered. Queen Cersei knows that Viserys has the mightiest army of the five claimants; he is the greatest threat to her son’s throne, she deems, and so his supporters in the Vale must be stopped from reinforcing their allies in the Reach.

The Valelords are immensely frustrated. Lady Mina Arryn, born Tyrell, and her husband Lord Elbert did much of the work planning the revolt against King Rhaegar that eventually turned into this war, carefully stirring up dissent across the Seven Kingdoms. Now, from their perspective, everything has gone wrong. Many of the people who disapprove of King Rhaegar as much as they do are fighting against them, in the name of claimants other than their own. And with the rivermen blocking the passes through the Mountains of the Moon and the Narrow Sea men blocking their little fleet, they cannot send the knights of the Vale to help their allies. The Mountains of the Moon have long been thought to be the shield of the Vale that keeps it safe from foreign conquerors, isolating the Vale from the tumult and turbulence that have often prevailed in the rest of Westeros in many periods of history; but now, that isolation, that ease of being cut off from the rest of the continent, has turned from a blessing to a curse.

Cersei hopes that the Lord of the Eyrie might support Aegon of the Rock, betrothing his half-Tyrell daughter Aemma to her son Aegon instead of to Viserys, if the Reach can be removed from the war while leaving the Vale intact. But Cersei—not, it must be said, entirely willingly—is now the bride of Ardrian Celtigar, Lord of Claw Isle, as part of the bargain that saw the Narrow Sea lords consent to support Aegon of the Rock’s claim to the Iron Throne. And Lord Ardrian is a peevish old man, proud and cruel. He has no desire to share power any more than he has to. Once he has got the former queen with child, he packs her off to Claw Isle, to be waited on by servants who have served House Celtigar all their lives, while keeping her children on Dragonstone. Along with Lord Monford Velaryon—whose son Monterys is married to Rhaenys of the Rock, the elder of Cersei’s two daughters by King Rhaegar—Lord Ardrian effectively usurps her role in planning the war which is nominally being waged for her family.

With Cersei gone and unable to threaten their power, the two greatest lords of the Narrow Sea attempt to involve Aegon of the Rock in their councils. The boy proves truculent, unwilling to sit quietly and condone his mother’s exile. He recommends absurd strategies, ranting about the need to kill traitors; one minute he demands an invasion of the riverlands, the next a strike upon the iron islands because they will never see it coming; and he often asks to see his mother again. Lord Monford and Lord Ardrian consider him stroppy, argumentative, not very clever, and not very pliable.

Meanwhile, Princess Rhaenys Targaryen, the secondborn child of Queen Cersei by King Rhaegar, is a small sweet-natured girl who does as she is told.

Shortly later, His Grace Aegon of the House Targaryen, the Sixth of His Name, suffers an unfortunate common childhood illness, and little Rhaenys is crowned as queen.

Lord Tywin is suspicious, but there is little he can do. His daughter, his favourite son and his grandchildren are firmly in the hands of the Narrow Sea lords. They cannot be sent to him by ship, lest they fall into the hands of the ironborn, who rule the waves on the Sunset Sea since Lord Quellon Greyjoy’s great victory over the Redwyne fleet; and they cannot be sent to him by land, of course. He cannot ask for his children and grandchildren to be sent to him for their safety; it would mean their capture by the enemy. He cannot denounce the Narrow Sea lords as murderers; it would mean the deaths of his twin children and his remaining grandchildren and the loss of the support of the Narrow Sea lords, for they would have to choose another side of the war. Later, he promises himself, he will find out the truth about how his grandson died, and if he judges it was indeed murder then he will not be gentle. A Lannister always pays his debts. But he must see Robert Baratheon, Visenya of Riverrun and Little Aegon defeated and his children and grandchildren back in his hands, first, or else he will lose them all and destroy his own legacy.

Meanwhile, the crownlands collapse against the fury of the invading rivermen. For all their courage, they are too few and their foes are too many. Hoster Tully, the elderly Lord of Riverrun and Lord Paramount of the Trident, reaches the walls of King’s Landing at the head of a steel serpent of knights and men-at-arms. He then settles down, in no haste, and sets his host to felling trees and building siege weapons. No host comes to relieve the city; everyone else is elsewhere. Moons later—a fortnight after the death of King Viserys—the rivermen unleash their siege weapons upon King’s Landing.

It seems that the storming will be a tremendously bloody, difficult undertaking, but the cityfolk of King’s Landing hate Queen Jeyne Targaryen born Chelsted with a passion, for the great massacre which followed the riot that killed King Rhaegar. There is another riot, while Tully sworn men are assailing the walls.

The lords of the crownlands and their men have fought well, and they have an army of thousands at King’s Landing. They can fight the soldiers of the Trident scaling their walls. They can suppress a vicious riot by thousands of enraged cityfolk who despise them. But they cannot do both at once.

The city falls. Little Aegon is smothered in his cradle by a smallfolk woman whose son was killed by the gold cloaks of King Rhaegar and Queen Jeyne. And Visenya of Riverrun, called Vis, Queen of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, rides in triumph through the gates of King’s Landing, as the cityfolk cheer and cast flowers upon the conquering queen.

Three of four kings are dead. One king and two queens remain. The dreams and weddings of the silver king have set Westeros alight, and even the ocean of blood that has been spilt is not yet enough to quench the flame.


	4. The Last Alliance

While the lords of the Trident encamp outside King’s Landing, building siege towers and trebuchets to seize the city in Queen Vis’s name, Lord Tywin Lannister and King Robert Baratheon make war over the bloody beaten corpse of the Reach.

King Robert crosses the Mander beside Lord Alester Florent of Brightwater, whom he has named High Marshal of the Reach and Lord Paramount of the Mander. Lord Alester does not bring an army with him, for his men have to remain besieging ‘his’ new fief of Highgarden, where Lady Olenna Tyrell remains defiant and hurls insults at his envoys behind her walls. Nonetheless his presence is useful to Robert as he passes through the lands between the oceanroad and the roseroad, urging his fellow Reachlords that the time of the Tyrells is over and they would be wise to bend the knee. Lord Alester, a Reachlord himself, serves the new order as a more familiar face, whereas submission directly to Robert would feel like stormlander tyranny; the stormlands and the Reach have been at war many times, over the past thousands of years, and it is not only the proud stormlords who remember that. Bending the knee to Lord Alester, who is one of their own, rather than directly to Robert, makes submission to a stormlander king more bearable for Reachlords, though they will never love him.

The stormlands are not a wealthy kingdom. In the vastness of their armies, they cannot compare to the might of the west. To win, Robert understands, he must seek other advantages.

The stormlanders have a long history of hatred with the Reachfolk, and in this war they have not been kind conquerors. Ser Renly Baratheon, the so-called ‘Butcher of the Blueburn’, who ruthlessly pillaged the land along the river Blueburn in order to force the Reachlords of that land to come out of their castles and confront him to their doom, is particularly despised by Reachfolk. But even the worst of Baratheon cruelty can scarce compare to the deeds of Lord Tywin Lannister of Casterly Rock, the Hand of Queen Rhaenys. Lord Tywin reduced much of the northwestern Reach’s lush green plains to a charred wasteland of ash and blackened bone, to deny food to the pursuing Tyrell army as the Lannister army retreated northward. Most Reachlords hate the Baratheons, for good reason, but they hate the Lord of Casterly Rock even more. Thus, to many, Robert seems the lesser of two evils.

The remnants of Ser Garlan Tyrell’s army (once Randyll Tarly’s), defeated in the Battle of Hollyford, by-and-large bend the knee to House Baratheon when House Tyrell falls, if only because they want to survive House Tyrell’s end and they deem House Lannister even worse. The Reachmen between the roseroad and the oceanroad do not have many men left, due to all the slaughter of the war so far, but their submission enables the stormlander army to advance more quickly than the westermen.

Ser Renly Baratheon, who did not march to Highgarden with his brothers, is sent new orders. He is to take his army into the part of the crownlands that lies south of the river Blackwater and secure them for Baratheon rule.

As his outriders bring him word of his enemy’s movements, Lord Tywin grits his teeth and dispatches his brother Ser Kevan to establish a firm defensive line in the northern Reach, to hold off the Baratheon advance. He himself marches eastward, aiming to seize the heart of the Reach, west of the Mander, and from there cross the great river and bring war into the stormlands.

Much victory has graced the red-and-golden lion banners in this war. Mace Tyrell, the Lord of Highgarden, and King Viserys Targaryen, oft known as the Last Dragon, have fallen to Lannister swords. Great hosts have been fearlessly faced and shattered by the might of the west. But the careful positioning required to achieve those victories has left Lord Tywin’s host placed too far to the north to easily seize control of the Reach in the aftermath of his hard-won battles.

Once the remainder of Tyrell strength has been crushed, leaving only a garrison besieged at Highgarden, King Robert Baratheon sends his middle brother back northeastward the way they came, to secure his unsteady new conquests. Ser Stannis’s host, mostly stormlanders but with several thousand Reachmen, march from Highgarden as fast as they can and cross the Mander at the ford near Longtable. They meet Lord Tywin’s sixteen-thousand men on a flat plain between Bitterbridge and Goldengrove.

He has motivation to succeed. King Robert has said he intends to make both of his brothers great lords in their own right, if he should prove victorious; but he has not yet said which of the Seven Kingdoms they will be given. If he can defeat Lord Tywin here and then push on into the westerlands, his stormlords tell him, he might be made Lord of Casterly Rock. When House Hightower’s lands are stripped from the Reach to reward Quellon Greyjoy’s loyal service, that will make him the greatest lord in Westeros.

For those stakes, the Lord of Casterly Rock and the man who means to replace him prepare for battle.

Ser Stannis Baratheon would prefer to prepare stakes and caltrops in the earth and make his enemies come to him, but that is not suited to these broad, flat, green lands, here in the central Reach. If he did, Lord Tywin would simply march around him and proceed into the stormlands, in order to force Robert’s army to leave the Reach by laying his homeland to waste. That, Stannis cannot allow. So he does not lay fixed fortifications. He keeps many outriders, lest he be taken unawares, and keeps his host ready to move to block off the westermen.

For all his martial reputation—which, now that he has triumphed over King Viserys the Last Dragon, is great indeed—Lord Tywin Lannister, too, is fond of ambushes and traps. Well does he remember the masterful means by which he tricked and defeated Mace Tyrell in the Battle of Churnbrook Valley. He does not like a battlefield that he cannot sculpt to his purpose. But the Reach has few natural obstacles, its rivers excluded, and he dares not concede these immense fertile plains to House Baratheon.

Therefore it is to be a battle on an open field.

The Baratheon men gather in great blocks of pikemen, shielding the famed longbowmen of the stormlands. It is a dry day, good for archery. Mayhaps they hoped to face a gallant knightly charge, to be crushed upon a wall of spears; but Tywin Lannister is not such a fool. He has footmen of his own, and he sends them forth, long pikes bristling, hiding behind a wall of interlocked shields to protect them from arrows.

It is a slow, un-glamorous battle, as the minds of both commanders are at work. Long do the hosts of foot struggle against one another, pressing here, withdrawing there, pushing and pulling, ever-shifting the pressure. Sometimes they open up in false retreats, aimed to feign panic and then clamp shut like iron jaws, which neither commander falls for.

Slowly, purposely, day after day, the Baratheon men fall back—never far, but lessening the pressure. The Lannisters follow. It is almost as if they are waiting for something.

Lord Tywin notices. On the sixth day of battle, a company of Lannister horse charge past the left flank, seeking to take the Baratheons in the rear. Ser Stannis notices; his footmen rotate and he dispatches knights to rush to meet them.

But Ser Gregor Clegane’s charge cannot be withstood. The immense knight leads a spearhead of heavy horse that tears through the tired Baratheon army. The host shudders, and splinters. Stannis Baratheon himself is killed in the battle by some lowborn pikeman whose name is lost to history. House Lannister is triumphant.

Lord Tywin marches eastward at pace. Ser Renly Baratheon’s men, who were force-marching as fast as they could to aid his brother, are too late to turn the tide. Outnumbered by the Lannister host, the remnants of Baratheon strength fall back. Advised by his stormlords, Renly crosses the Mander at Bitterbridge and spreads out, laying caltrops, aiming to hold the westermen at the river.

The Lannister army looms over them, ever-closer. The Baratheon army dreads their coming. Renly’s stormlanders are not cowards, but they know how badly outnumbered they are. Most of Robert’s strength went westward after the Battle of Hollyford when Garlan Tyrell was defeated, to finish the overthrow of House Tyrell. Most of the strength of the crownlands was fighting the rivermen at the time, in the lands north of the Blackwater, so it was not thought that Renly would need a large army to subdue the southern crownlands. His outriders, of whom he has many, scour the land for Lannister spies, preventing the enemy from getting a good look at his numbers; but the Lannisters do not know he has only four-thousand men. Even with the river, they know they are doomed.

Then an exhausted messenger on a half-dead horse reaches Lord Tywin.

Ser Kevan Lannister’s eleven-thousand men have been defeated on the Little Mander, south of Goldengrove. Ser Kevan himself has been made captive. And King Robert Baratheon is marching up into the westerlands, with nothing in his way.

The westerlords are in uproar. They would have been willing to attempt a contested river-crossing, on one of the deepest rivers in Westeros, if all else were clear; but now that their homes are under threat, they deem it folly. Even if they should overcome the Butcher of the Blueburn and cross the Mander, what will it gain them? They will have to rush back again, while the most dangerous of the Baratheon brothers is ravaging the west.

Infuriated, ranting and raging of ‘disloyalty’, the Lord of Casterly Rock has to abandon the Mander and rush back to the west. Robert Baratheon awaits him there.

But while stag and lion butt heads in the south, other events are afoot, further north in Westeros.

Mina Arryn, the Tyrell-born Lady of the Eyrie, and her husband Lord Elbert have been planning the downfall of King Rhaegar the Whoremonger before anyone. Much of the effort that stirred up the smallfolk of the realm against the Whoremonger King, septons preaching of his impiety and wickedness, the ultimate cause of the riot that tore Rhaegar to pieces… this was their work. That was done to lay the preparations for the rise of King Viserys to restore order and piety and good governance to the Seven Kingdoms.

Those plans lie in tatters now. Lady Mina’s only child, her daughter Aemma, cannot now make a marriage alliance with a king or his male heir, for there are none to be wed. Dowager Queen Catelyn gave Rhaegar only daughters: Visenya of Riverrun, Rhaenys of Riverrun and Minisa. Dowager Queen Cersei gave birth to a son, Aegon of the Rock, but he is dead; Rhaenys of the Rock is queen now, by the Lannister reckoning, and neither she nor her sister Visenya of the Rock can wed Aemma. Robert is a king, but long married, and the ten-nameday-old crown prince Arlan Baratheon is on Pyke, betrothed to Asha Greyjoy. That was the price that Lord Quellon demanded to seal the Baratheon-Greyjoy alliance, to prove that Robert would not play him false if he sent his ironmen to fight and die for Robert’s claim.

Aemma Arryn will never be queen. But with House Tyrell wiped out—for Lady Olenna’s barbs were cut short when her garrison decided that they did not want to die for her and handed her over to the Florent army in chains—she is the heiress to both the Lord of the Eyrie and the Lady of Highgarden.

Robert Baratheon already has a Lord of Highgarden, Alester Florent, who is married and has a married son. That puts him out of consideration. But Queen Visenya and Queen Rhaenys do not. Rhaegar’s daughters have no obstacle to supporting Aemma’s claim, for forty-thousand armed Valemen are a kingly prize. The knights of the Vale are kept confined in their homeland by the men of the riverlands, blocking the passes through the Mountains of the Moon, and the fleet of the Narrow Sea lords, blocking the Bay of Crabs. If either of those become allies, the Valemen will be free to go out and turn the tide of the war.

The question, then, is—Who?

Both Lord Tywin, as Queen Rhaenys’s Hand, and Lord Hoster, as Queen Visenya’s, send highborn, highly regarded envoys to the Eyrie. Lord Tywin sends his firstborn son Jaime to plead Queen Rhaenys’s case to the Valelords. Lord Hoster sends his brother Brynden to speak for Queen Visenya. Both men promise copious amounts of gold, positions at court and royal favour, as well as full acknowledgement of Mina Arryn’s rights as the heiress of House Tyrell to rule all of the Reach, undiminished, if the Vale should support them.

Dowager Queen Catelyn is well-liked by the Valelords. The Faith of the Seven is strong in the Vale. The pious Valelords were appalled when Rhaegar set her aside. Nigh to a man, they consider her the wronged party, and so Vis’s cause has much support. But Cersei is sympathised with, too. King Rhaegar setting her aside as wife and queen, imprisoning her and accusing her of disgusting charges which almost everybody in the Seven Kingdoms believes were obviously lies to excuse him marrying another wife—incest and cuckoldry—was the spark that led to Rhaegar’s death and set off this bonfire of war. In that matter, history remembers Queen Cersei as the innocent, wronged bride and King Rhaegar as the vile, lustful, whore-mongering husband who slandered her and tried to kill her.

Both of King Rhaegar’s queenly daughters—Visenya of Riverrun and Rhaenys of the Rock—are regarded in the Vale much more highly than their thrice-married father. The Lord and Lady Arryn would be able to maintain their rule of the Eyrie and the allegiance of their bannermen if they declared for either side.

Vis holds King’s Landing now, but with the fleet of the Narrow Sea lords transporting the armies of the Vale there, that could soon change. House Arryn possesses the power to knock House Tully out of the war at a stroke, and both of them know it.

House Lannister has lost more men in the war, due to all the bloody battles and catastrophes in the Reach. But House Lannister had more men to start with.

All seems even… except that Hoster Tully did not kill Mace Tyrell, Lady Mina Arryn’s brother. Tywin Lannister did.

The Lord and Lady of the Eyrie declare for Visenya of Riverrun. The three-thousand rivermen blocking the passes through the Mountains of the Moon give way, when Brynden Tully comes among them and gives the order; and forty-thousand splendidly armoured Valemen issue forth from the Bloody Gate, to win Queen Vis her throne.

Brynden Tully and Elbert Arryn meet Lord Hoster the Hand of the Queen at King’s Landing. When their armies join, it is a host of more than sixty-thousand men: by far the greatest left in Westeros. The passes through the mountains of the westerlands are rocky and narrow; that way would not be wise to attack. Therefore they attack first into the southern crownlands, held by Ser Renly Baratheon.

The Baratheons, outnumbered more than ten to one, fall back before the mailed fist of the Trident and the Vale. Ser Renly tries to harass and weaken the enemy host with raids to its side, attacking and slipping away before he can be caught; but the lord Hand’s army is too tremendous to affect it much. What ensues, for the stormlanders, is a long retreat back to Storm’s End. Seeing how outmatched the Baratheons are, their lords bannermen desert them, one by one. Soon Ser Renly is besieged in Storm’s End by a great host led by Ser Edmure Tully.

After bringing the stormlands to heel, the old Lord of Riverrun marches into the Reach. When Lord Tywin Lannister and King Robert Baratheon hear of what has transpired, their great battle does not take place. Both of them see that Queen Vis, previously no stronger than either of them, is by far the greater threat now. Lord Tywin and King Robert meet each other without a single arrow loosed. They agree upon borders between their realms, assigning the stormlands more than half of the Reach to King Robert (who stood in the stronger position) and the rest of the Reach to Lord Tywin and Queen Rhaenys along with all of the westerlands.

In the final stage of the war, the so-called Last Alliance fights to prevent the Seven Kingdoms from falling entirely under the power of Riverrun.

The Last Alliance meets Hoster Tully in battle at Longtable, where they fight the greatest battle of the war. The armoured fist of the Trident and the Vale crashes against the sturdy men of the stormlands, the Reach and the westerlands, and punches through. The men of the Reach abandon the Florent overlord imposed upon them and join Lord Hoster’s side, crying out for Mina Tyrell. Baratheon and Lannister die fighting side-by-side against the gleaming steel columns of the bloody-handed Lord of Riverrun.

The Last Alliance falls. It came too late. The flower of westerlander and stormlander manhood lie rotting and feeding worms in the once-green fields of the Reach, slaughtered in a hundred bloody battles against Mace Tyrell, against his Reachlords, against the Last Dragon, and against each other. Queen Vis lost men too, in her conquest of the crownlands, but not as many. Either of them alone could have stood against Queen Vis before she gained the Vale’s allegiance, but not now.

Victorious, Hoster Tully sends forth his knights to chase the scattering, fleeing remnants of the Last Alliance and ride them down. A sea of blood of a scale unseen since the Field of Fire drowns the burnt and blackened lands of Longtable.

Lord Elbert Arryn’s men march throughout the Reach, securing surrenders on behalf of his wife as Lady of Highgarden. Many join him eagerly. Even for those who do not, so many men have been slain that there is little taste to do anything else.

After watching all this bloodletting without spilling a drop of their own, the Prince of Dorne declares himself a sovereign ruler again, as his ancestors were, of old. They want no part of the pit of war that the realm has become, and fear that the Iron Throne’s taxes upon Dorne, an undamaged region, to fund the repairs would be immense. Invading Dorne has not, historically, been easy; huge numbers of Westerosi men have been slain in the war, exhausting and bankrupting the Westerosi realm, whereas the Dornish are untested; and the rest of Westeros has long seen Dorne as essentially foreign anyway. The realm is too tired to contest this declaration. Vis lets the Dornish go their own way. With the realm of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros weakened by the long war, it is no longer strong enough to keep control of its outlying provinces.

House Hightower capitulates to Queen Vis, and to Lady Mina Arryn as the rightful ruler of the Reach. At this stage, they would bend the knee to anyone who would help them against the ironborn. Lord Quellon’s armies have seized all of their once-large and prosperous domain except for Oldtown itself, guarded by its walls. Those lands are taken back by Lord Hoster. The rivermen and Valemen are too many to be resisted; years of ironborn victories are undone in weeks. Lord Quellon Greyjoy is slain in battle at Bandallon, and his eldest son Balon does not share his ambitions of taking part in the wars of the ‘green lands’, helping one faction of ‘green landers’ against another in order to win royal favour. Instead Balon declares himself a king and pulls out of the Reach, deeming Lord Hoster a fearsome opponent, too formidable to be fought. He sets his sights on more distant prey, outside Lord Hoster’s protection, and sends a letter to King’s Landing seeking an alliance after he has already launched his attack upon his chosen enemy.

After the defeat of the ironborn, Lord Hoster marches north, into the westerlands. The northern approach to the westerlands is full of mountains, easily defensible, but the southern approach has only pleasant rolling hills; Bittersteel tore through them like an axe through ripe cheese in the First Blackfyre Rebellion, and they are no obstacle to the great host of the Trident.

Woe to the vanquished, it is said, and the westermen have essentially no armies left; Lord Tywin stripped their defences to the bone, to wage his war for his granddaughter’s throne, and now they are helpless before the predatory Lord of Riverrun. Many holdings are stripped from the westerlords and granted to riverlords who have served Lord Hoster loyally—just as he did in the stormlands, too. After Tywin, Tyrion, Kevan, Lancel, Willem and Martyn Lannister have all been executed for treason against the rightful queen, along with many of their other relatives, Lord Hoster grants Casterly Rock to little Tyrek Lannister. Tyrek is made to marry Princess Rhaenys Targaryen (of Riverrun), the elder of Queen Vis’s two sisters, and Rhaenys’s rule of the westerlands is enforced by a large garrison of rivermen. Thus Vis gains a reliable ally in Casterly Rock, and Lord Hoster’s bloodline comes to rule the westerlands.

Seeing that the war is ended and fearful of Lord Hoster’s wrath, the unscrupulous Narrow Sea lords, led by Monford Velaryon of Driftmark and Ardrian Celtigar of Claw Isle, betray the Lannister cause. Lord Monford sends his son’s wife, Rhaenys of the Rock, and her sister Visenya of the Rock on a swift ship to King’s Landing. Lord Ardrian is so utterly ruthless that he puts his own wife—Cersei Celtigar, previously Targaryen, previously Lannister—bound and gagged on the same ship, as soon as she finishes giving birth to his son. Cersei and her daughters live in heavily guarded tower cells in the Red Keep for the rest of their lives, never seeing each other again. Both lords are welcomed back into the queen’s peace.

Storm’s End, held by Baratheon loyalists, holds out against the Tully besiegers in defiance of Queen Vis, King Rhaegar’s daughter, in the name of King Arlan Baratheon as Robert’s eldest son and heir. When word of the defeat of the Last Alliance reaches them, Queen Alla, Robert’s wife, has little interest in maintaining her husband’s ambitions, given the risk to her children. In alliance with her brother Ser Cortnay Penrose and her castellan Ser Renly Baratheon the Butcher of the Blueburn, Alla seizes control of Storm’s End from Robert’s loyalists in a night of fighting, remembered in the stormlands as the Night of Knives, and she surrenders to Ser Edmure Tully’s army outside her walls.

Arlan is on Pyke, where he was pledged to marry Asha Greyjoy. King Balon is outraged at the very idea of a ‘green lander’ fucking his daughter, a marriage that Lord Quellon insisted upon without Balon’s consent, so Arlan turns from his goodson-to-be into his hostage. Balon is prevailed upon to send Arlan back to Storm’s End, as part of the bargain that sees the Iron Throne recognise him as a sovereign king, as long as he does not attack any realm that is under Queen Vis’s protection. If he does not, the Iron Throne has no quarrel with him; if he does, Vis promises, the iron islands will be razed to the ground.

Dorne, the iron islands and the north have gone their own ways; but Vis reigns in King’s Landing as Her Grace Visenya of the House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Lady of the Five Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm. The westerlands, the riverlands, the Vale, the Reach and the stormlands all pay fealty to her, the eldest of King Rhaegar’s seven children. Her mother Dowager Queen Catelyn is a great presence at court. So is her youngest sister Princess Minisa, though the middle sister Princess Rhaenys (of Riverrun) is on the other side of the continent ruling Casterly Rock.

Her grandfather is not a young man at the time of the war. He dies a few years after it, as Hoster Tully, Lord of Riverrun, Lord Paramount of the Trident and Hand of the Queen. He is long remembered as the bloody-handed warlord who brought Westeros to heel: Hoster the Queenmaker, the man who made the rivers run red with blood.

Queen Visenya remained unmarried throughout the war, so that she could be wedded, if need be, to reward a powerful House that would help House Tully win the war for her crown. No such House emerged, except House Arryn, with only daughters; the realm splintered in five, more than anyone expected. But a queen needs an heir, and for a trueborn heir of her body, she needs a husband. Therefore, at war’s end, as a maiden queen of three-and-twenty namedays, she weds at last: not to some low vassal; not to reward a defeated enemy, who fought against her and surrendered, with the ultimate prize of a queen’s hand in marriage; nor to an Arryn, for Lord Elbert would be extremely displeased if she wed a son of a lesser branch of House Arryn, lest her husband later come to usurp the Vale from Elbert’s daughter on the principle of male-only inheritance with the might of the crown on his side; but into the House she loves more than any other. Visenya weds her uncle Ser Edmure Tully, a man nine years her elder. The riverlands and the crownlands thus join as one. Gladly she takes the Tully name, for she cares far more for her mother’s family, who raised her and loved her and fought for her, than for the family of her father, who sent her away and tried to steal her inheritance. In the world’s eyes she was a Targaryen until now, but in her own eyes she has always been a Tully.

Edmure and Visenya Tully’s marriage is fruitful, with four children: Edmyn, Hoster, Celia and Axel. They rule for many years of peace and plenty, well-beloved by the smallfolk. In times to come, they are wistfully remembered as Good King Ed and Good Queen Vis.

Rhaegar the Whoremonger is remembered as the last king from House Targaryen, and one of the worst. Thus ends the reign of the Dragon Kings over Westeros, and thus begins the reign of the Fish Kings.

But the Fish Kings do not rule the whole of Westeros. For there are tales that have not yet been told, of the distant north and the horrors that dwell there.


	5. Of the North and the Nightwalker

When King Rhaegar the Whoremonger is ripped apart under a heap of outraged smallfolk during a failed bid to execute his wife, five men and women make their claims to the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. Lord Rickard Stark of Winterfell, the Warden of the North, does not declare himself for any of them. Lord Stark’s demesne, most remote of the Seven Kingdoms, shuns the rest of the realm. That tradition dates back more than a hundred years, since Rickon Stark the heir to Winterfell perished outside the walls of Sunspear under the banners of King Daeron the Young, spurring a lengthy period of war and strife in the north.  
  
Contrary to how he will be remembered, as the arch-isolationist, Lord Rickard was, in fact, initially inclined to seek cooperation with neighbouring kingdoms. He had felt that the north’s aloofness weakened House Stark in attempting to pull the attention of the crown to northern concerns and northern interests. If royal policies, of the court to which northmen paid taxes as much as anyone else did, were to be sculpted to his favour, it was hard to be heard if no-one else were on the north’s side. Against the objections of others in the north—notably his traditionally-minded wife, Lady Lyarra Stark, daughter of a mountain clanswoman, the foremost advocate of northern isolation and disdain for southern ways—Rickard sought to remedy the other kingdoms’ perception of the north as a foreign land, uninterested in their affairs, by forging links of fosterage with Houses Arryn and Baratheon and a link of marriage with House Tully.  
  
The former policy was successful, at first. By all accounts Eddard Stark and Robert Baratheon were close friends until other events forced them to part ways. The latter was not. Lord Hoster Tully of Riverrun, he who would become known as the Queenmaker, was a proud and powerful lord, and when Prince Rhaegar the heir to the Iron Throne paid court to his daughter Catelyn he immediately seized the opportunity of a lifetime. House Tully was bound by marriage to the Dragon Kings instead of to the direwolf of Stark. Lord Rickard was no less proud than the Queenmaker, and indeed he saw House Tully as lowlier than House Stark, strange though such a thought may sound now in the era of the Fish Kings; and so Lord Hoster’s rejection deeply embarrassed him, as though he had been turned down by a lesser House. Heeding the advice of Lady Lyarra, for he was convinced that this turn of events proved her right, Lord Rickard broke the fosterage of their second son Eddard in the Eyrie, recalling him at once to Winterfell. Afterwards, the Lord and Lady of Winterfell turned down the entreaties of Lord Robert Baratheon of Storm’s End for his daughter’s hand, stony-faced, fearful that the Baratheon boy would heap further shame upon the name of Stark. In this, too, he listened to his wife, for House Baratheon was a bastard line; Lady Lyarra was particularly worried about the threat of bastards, corrupt and dishonest by nature, and had raised her daughter Lyanna accordingly. Ever after, for the rest of Rickard’s lifetime, the isolationists have been ascendant, and the north has turned its back on the rest of Westeros.  
  
For the first few moons after King Rhaegar’s death, the north remains at peace. Then a hundred-thousand hungry wildlings appear on the far side of the Wall.  
  
The Night’s Watch, traditionally bolstered by exiles of the defeated side in wars, has steadily shrunk throughout the reign of House Targaryen. The Dragon Kings ended the petty wars between petty kingdoms that raged in Westeros for so long. By the end of Rhaegar’s reign, the realm has not seen a serious war since the War of the Ninepenny Kings, and even that did not touch the soil of Westeros proper. The last truly large-scale war was the First Blackfyre Rebellion, a hundred years ago. The Watch, in short, is undermanned. It has seven-hundred men—seven-hundred, to hold against all the fury of the wild.  
  
In the end, they serve to do little more than warn the northern lords.  
  
When he hears of the wildling threat, Lord Rickard Stark of Winterfell calls upon all true northern bannermen to declare their loyalty and levy their smallfolk for war. The closest—from House Umber, House Karstark and the clans of the Grey Mountains—go straight to the Wall, without going south, first, to muster at Winterfell. The need for urgency is too great. These northmen reach the Wall just in time, they believe, to mount it and hold off the wildling vanguard. Lord Rickard rides to the Wall with all haste to take command of the defence, leaving his sons and grandsons to raise more men to join him later.  
  
But Tormund Giantsbane the King-Beyond-the-Wall—Tall-talker, Hornblower, Breaker of Ice, Thunderfist, Husband to Bears, Mead-King of Ruddy Hall, Speaker to Gods and Father of Hosts—is not here to invade. He is here to talk, and talk he does, in a sunlit clearing surrounded by pine trees, with Lord Rickard Stark the Warden of the North.  
  
King Tormund informs the Lord of Winterfell of the peril that has fallen upon the lands of the wildling people. The white death, star-eyed lords of the dead and unremembered, cold and cruel as winter itself, have risen from beyond the grave where they were thought to have resided for eight-thousand years. The Long Night will come again, he says, with seas of rotting flesh swarming over the world, led by tiny specks of frost and starlight. His people are not here to fight; they are here to seek help, to settle in the north and to join forces in the defence of all mankind.  
  
The shadow of the past lies heavy in the snowy clearing. Both men know well of the years of bitterness and hate between their peoples, once First Men brothers but now estranged by millennia of blood and gore. That knowledge, with the restless shades of all those that they have lost to each other, is a heavy burden to bear.  
  
Rickard listens to this tale in silence. Then, softly, he asks a single question.  
  
Years ago, Lord Rickard disposed of the matches of all his children in the north. Brandon Stark, his heir, disgraced by the sudden refusal of his suit for Catelyn Tully’s hand, was the greatest prize Lord Rickard had to offer to the northern nobility. The victor was Sybelle Stark, born Locke, whose father won the favour of House Stark by loyal service. She took up residence in Winterfell several years after the wedding of Rhaegar and Catelyn Targaryen. A pious lady, she did not take well to Brandon’s frequent and indiscreet philandering. (One wag said Brandon knew half the young men of noble blood in the north, and ‘knew’ half the highborn young women.) She bore him two trueborn sons, but their marriage was an unhappy one.  
  
Eddard Stark, the second-born, did not get on well with his father, because he was not permitted to maintain a correspondence with “that wretched southron boy who thinks himself worthy of my daughter”. Frequent arguments on the subject made Lord Rickard weary of the company of his irritatingly persistent second son. When the rich and powerful Lord Rodrik Ryswell learnt of his daughter Barbery’s deflowering by Brandon Stark and demanded of the Lord of Winterfell that a Stark had disgraced her and so a Stark should do right by her, Lord Rickard saw the answer to his prayers. He promptly agreed, arranged a marriage between Barbrey and Eddard, and granted them a keep two dozen miles from Winterfell. Salacious rumours swirled around her afterward, claiming that Lady Barbrey carried on an affair with the older and more handsome Brandon Stark for the rest of her life; but it is possible that this was slander from her enemies, for, though she was beautiful, Barbrey Stark was not well-liked. She bore six children, noticeably more robust than Lady Sybelle’s, a fact she never tired of remarking on.  
  
Last and happiest was the marriage of Benjen Stark. He wedded Dacey Mormont of Bear Island, and they lived in a keep of their own outside Winterfell. By the time the war broke out, they had a son and a daughter.  
  
Shortly after Lord Rickard rejected Robert Baratheon’s suit for his daughter Lyanna, he chose another husband for her: Jon Umber the heir to Last Hearth, known as ‘the Smalljon’, a huge rough rugged man with little patience for sweet songs and courtly life. Early in her marriage, she gave him a daughter, Serena Umber. A free spirit, Lyanna enjoyed taking long rides on a swift horse around the Umber lands, fearless and swift as the wind, and one day, it is presumed, she was carried off by a group of wildling men. Her grieving father and husband launched several punitive expeditions beyond the Wall, killing hundreds of wildlings and burning down dozens of their villages, but she was never seen again.  
  
Tormund tells his tall tale of the dead risen again, of wights, of Others. Lord Rickard says not a word. Then he asks him, “Where is my daughter?”  
  
Tormund does not know, cannot possibly know. Lyanna Umber must be with one of the free folk, mayhaps somewhere in the teeming hundred-thousand under his command. He is leader of so many that he does not know the names of even a tenth of his men, let alone all of their wives too. How can he? He did not order the fate of Lyanna; the free folk are not an obedient people as their enemies are, and even if they were, he was not even a serious contender to be King-Beyond-the-Wall when she disappeared. And she and her free-folk husband might not be among those of the free folk who joined his host at all.  
  
He calls among his people for Lady Lyanna to show herself. He tells them all of the importance of this task. He receives nothing. And so, with a heavy heart, he tells Lord Stark in all honesty that either his daughter was never here at all or she does not want him to find her.  
  
That is not what Rickard wants to hear. Grief and rage come like winds of a gale screaming from him, damning Tormund for a liar and his people as kidnappers and rapers, not trusting a single word of their claims about what has been happening beyond the Wall. Negotiations end, and the wildlings have no choice but to die at the Others’ blades or to begin their assault upon the Wall.  
  
The huge host of King Tormund batters against a Wall forged of ice and spelldust. Mammoths crash upon the tunnels through the Wall, along with giants armed with unspeakably immense battering rams. Ofttimes they break through; but the northmen are ever quick to plug the gaps where they form, and fighting turns into close-quarters bloody melees, slaughter in the starless dark. Under the able leadership of Mance Rayder, Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, and Rickard Stark the Lord of Winterfell, the black brothers and northmen rain arrows from the sky, alight with pitch for the mammoths and giants, seeking to kill them before they can get close.  
  
The thunderous wrath of the wild breaks upon the Wall, but the black brothers stand, hard of limb and hard of heart. As the moons turn, more and more northmen arrive, even the famous horsemen of the barrowlands, the rills and the lower Mander, the great flat plains in the warmest, most southerly part of the north except for the Neck. The crannogmen come last of all, with nimble fingers and bows that shoot down countless wildlings.  
  
The raw strength of the wildlings is formidable, and men, women and even children strive to cross the Wall, knowing that if the northmen succeed in forcing them to stay on the wrong side of the Wall, here with the Others, then they are doomed to death and far, far worse; but against the relentless, untouchable hail of arrows from hundreds of feet above, they cannot prevail. They try, and fail, and fall apart. Scattered survivors flee in all directions, defeated, dreading and desperate.  
  
The lords of the north cheer Rickard Stark for his glorious victory over the evil barbarians. Unaccustomed to martial glory, Lord Rickard is delighted to be hailed as the Bloody Wolf of Winterfell. All praise his sagacious decision to dismiss the unwashed savages’ absurd claims about demons long-dead as lies and to refuse to let them through the Wall. Only a small son of Lord Howland Reed of Greywater Watch attempts to speak up, and the lofty lords ignore him. It is just an excuse to help the wildlings steal the north, these lords agree; it is an obvious lie; the foolish wildlings should have come up with a more believable one.  
  
Now that the wildlings have been defeated, some suggest taking part in the war for the Iron Throne. Brandon Stark proposes an invasion of the riverlands, to avenge the unprovoked humiliation that Lord Hoster and Catelyn Tully inflicted upon House Stark. His trueborn sons support their father; Barbrey’s sons agree as well. Eddard Stark agrees, and argues furthermore that the best way to stop the rising Faith of the Seven’s zealots from gaining a stranglehold over the realm is to support the Faith’s great enemy, Robert Baratheon. Lord Rickard is unconvinced. A northern invasion would end Lord Hoster’s hopes of seizing King’s Landing and topple his campaign, but who then will rule Westeros? Little Aegon, the king on the Iron Throne? Aegon of the Rock with his powerful Lannister grandfather and the fleet of the Narrow Sea lords? Robert Baratheon? King Viserys III, who has defeated the Baratheons in battle and is chasing Tywin Lannister out of the Reach as they speak? The situation is too complicated to know who stands a good chance of winning. If he fights for one king, he will be rewarded for loyalty to the ‘true king’ if his chosen claimant happens to win but he might be punished for high treason if his claimant loses the war and is therefore branded a usurper. Joining the war in the south, Rickard’s ally the Greatjon famously remarks, is “like sticking your cock in a beehive.” Rickard resolves upon the same strategy House Stark adopted in the First Blackfyre Rebellion: respond with courtesy to all claimants but commitment towards none, then bend the knee to whoever wins at the end, or mayhaps rebuild a sovereign Kingdom of the North if the Iron Throne has been weakened enough.  
  
In the rest of Westeros, the flame of what will become known as the War of the Trout Ascendant is still burning bright and red. Indeed, it has scarcely begun. Blood and fire, towns ransacked and farms despoiled, cover the south, and its graveyards are filled to bursting whenever the dead are given graves at all. But while the crows may feast on the rotten fruit of men’s pride and folly in the south, the north is free of that, men say as they toast the Bloody Wolf of Winterfell in their cups. Here in the north, the war is over.  
  
For moons afterward, terrified wildling survivors dash against the Wall, striving desperately to climb as if mortally afraid. Far below, unable to retaliate, they are easy prey; the black brothers of the Night’s Watch shoot them down from above. Many and more are slain. Few and fewer are taken prisoner. The tiny number of captives speak in tones of terror of the Others and their wights, but the black brothers, ancestral enemies of the wildlings, dismiss these stories with contempt. They firmly believe that the wildlings are just looking for an excuse to be able to raid the north more easily, and they have seen no sign of what the wildlings say. The lords of the Long Night are careful to stay out of eyeshot of the Wall, hidden with their fearsome servants among the trees of the Haunted Forest.  
  
At last, the mobs rushing for the Wall cease. The wildlings fall silent.  
  
And with the silence of the grave, cold corpses put one hand in front of the other, gripping and pulling themselves up the ice of the Wall.  
  
The lords of ice and darkness have planned their assault with care. They do not emerge from the Haunted Forest near any of the three castles the overstretched Night’s Watch still has enough men to man; they come out almost exactly half-way between Castle Black and Eastwatch, far from prying eyes. The unfathomably immense horde of the risen dead cross the half a mile of empty land between the Haunted Forest and the Wall. The climb takes less than a day per wight, else wildlings would not be able to survive it, and many wights climb beside each other at the same time. Many wights fall, losing their grip of the slippery ice; but many injuries that would kill a living man are not important to a wight.  
  
By the time a Night’s Watch patrol comes upon them, rides all the way back to Castle Black and then returns with reinforcements, thousands of wights are already on top of the Wall. In comparison, all the black brothers combined are less than a thousand.  
  
On the other side, the Children of Skadhi, as they call themselves, laugh to one another with sounds like crackling ice. So this is how the warm-blooded ones fall. Overcome by entropy, by the fading memory of the Night’s Watch’s importance over the thousands of years.  
  
Their inhuman eyes, as bright as stars in the night sky, shine with contempt. The foolish warm-blooded ones forget so quickly; their lives are so short. The Others’ lives are not. Each and every Other in this army has lived for at least a thousand years, so as not to be considered a child among their kind. The warm-blooded ones breed swiftly, spreading like a plague on the lands that should belong to them alone.  
  
It is time for the plague to be cleansed and for the Children of Skadhi to reclaim their birthright: the world their legends say their cold mother created for them.  
  
The white death comes in eerie silence, without a war-cry, against the bold black brothers. The Others do not deign to face the men of the Night’s Watch themselves. They do not hold them in respect. Warm-blooded ones are insignificant. They prefer to use their slaves.  
  
More than a hundred-thousand dead wildlings fight against the men who slew so many of them from above while they were living. Now the tables are turned. For the wildlings who rushed at the Wall, most of the population were terrified refugees fleeing from the Others, not fighters. However, for wights, unlike for the living, children, the sick, the old and decrepit and unskilled warriors are just as capable, implacable killers as grown and able-bodied men. It is no easy thing, to fight the true enemy. Tear off a head and a wight will scarcely notice; stab them in the heart and they will not fall. They must be cut apart, rendered physically incapable of holding a weapon; and even then the pieces will keep trying to fight, until they are burnt.  
  
Perhaps, in time, the black brothers would have learnt these lessons. But if there is one thing the black brothers do not have, it is time.  
  
The dead wildlings, risen again and forced by the Others into eternal slavery, slay their slayers. The men of the Night’s Watch fall. They soon add to the number of their foes.  
  
With the main strength of the Night’s Watch joined to their number, the hordes of the dead converge on Castle Black, the Shadow Tower and Eastwatch-by-the-Sea. The black brothers try to send ravens with messages of their grisly fate, but birds-of-prey, slain in the lands beyond the Wall and raised by the Others, chase down the ravens and kill them. The Others are not lackwits; they do not allow word of their coming to escape so easily.  
  
The Night’s Watch dies unseen, unmourned, unaided… but still standing.  
  
The army of the dead has lost thousands of wights—not ‘killed’, but lost to crushing injuries sufficient to render them no longer useful, due to falling from too high in the climb over the Wall. But the Others have far more than mere thousands. With their Wall reconquered—for the Children of Skadhi hold that it is they who used their powerful ice magics to construct the Wall as a barrier against mankind, and then had to retreat even further north when mankind seized it from them—the lords of the Long Night proceed into the north at the head of a host that knows no rest.  
  
Such a tremendous host cannot pass unseen. The northern lords did not trust the wildlings’ claims about the attacks of the risen dead, after thousands of years of raids and hatred between those peoples. When it is their own people telling tall tales of the return of the Long Night, they pay more heed. The dead overrun a swathe of villages across the Gift. Wherever they go, they slaughter people and compel them to join them; but the living are not their greatest prize. That is the dead. The oldest corpses, utterly rotted to dust, are of no use, but even a disembodied hand with no flesh, only bone, is not free of the Others’ power. Wherever the Others walk, skeletal figures push open their coffins and emerge groaning into the light to march beside their inhuman masters. They have no flesh left, but that is not required of them. For every living man, recently slain, who serves the white walkers, there are several who have been dead for decades or more.  
  
The north may be cold, poor and sparsely populated compared to the south, but next to the lands beyond the Wall it is warm, rich and full of people. As the army of the dead marches south, it is not shrinking; it is not standing still; it is swelling like the belly of a beast.  
  
The tales seem too fantastical to be believed, but the terror in the eyes of their people speaks volumes. The great lords of the north come to understand. Lord Rickard Stark calls his banners and appeals to the south for aid.  
  
He gets no answer. The south is aflame with war. Little Aegon, the king on the Iron Throne, is besieged in King’s Landing by an army of rivermen, while the bold, pious, well-loved warrior-king Viserys III is struggling to fight off the westermen, stormlanders and ironborn, all of whom are invading the Reach, and Viserys’s allies in the Vale are kept confined by the Blackfish’s army at the Bloody Gate and the fleet of the Narrow Sea lords. Between five kings the fate of Westeros hangs in the balance. Nobody has strength to spare. Besides, by House Stark’s decision, the north ignored the rest of Westeros’s calls for aid, so the rest of Westeros ignores the north’s.  
  
The great lords of the north rally their men from their vast, sparse domains; but every day lost means more villages overrun, more people massacred and more graveyards desecrated for the Others’ army. Already swollen with murdered wildlings, the host of the risen dead grows further as it marches. By sheer luck, built up over time, and bitter experience, the men of the north learn things in these battles, in particular the usefulness of fire as the best weapon against wights. Later, men become more and more refined in how to deploy it. But this knowledge is hard-gained, and there is so little time.  
  
The wights do not relent, do not eat, do not drink, do not tire. They march day and night. There is no distinction to them. For the Others bring with them a blanket of darkness that covers the sun. Where they come, daytime dies and is not born again; night rises over them, and men must huddle around campfires for heat and light in the world that they have made.  
  
Happier retellings prefer to imagine that the Long Night was ‘only’ a long winter, with days and nights like any other season. But it was not named the Long Night without cause.  
  
Worse, the lords of ice and darkness are not wholly unaware of the ways of men, strange though they find the minds of the warm-blooded ones. Their wights remember who they once were and are fully aware of what they are doing, yet are entirely helpless to prevent it, preserved from rot by Other-borne cold, undying and enslaved for all eternity.  
  
With the knowledge thus gained, part-way through the war the Others change their strategy dramatically, seeking to shatter mankind’s defences before they can truly begin. The slow crawl through the north ceases. They comprehend that men preparing for war gather at castles, beneath the banners of lords. Without authority to give them order, the warm-blooded ones are disorganised, scattered and vulnerable—much unlike the Children of Skadhi themselves, who make all decisions collectively and do not even have a concept of ‘leader’. So the Others decide to kill the lords and seize the castles.  
  
And the biggest castle of all in the north, they learn, is Winterfell.  
  
Last Hearth is well-stocked with food and firewood and pitch and oil, ready to fight off an incursion with its high walls. It is too close to the Wall; the Others arrive after Lord Jon Umber has mustered a substantial number of his men-at-arms, but before he can muster all of them, and certainly before he can get them to Winterfell. The army of the dead scour clean the lands outside it, killing whoever they can, and detach a tiny fraction of their number outside—sufficient only to prevent a sortie, not to take the castle—and then move on. Under cover of impenetrable darkness, in the grip of endless night, the Greatjon and his garrison are tormented by anticipation. They stay behind their walls, keeping their fires burning against the dark, ever watchful, ever ready for an attack that does not come.  
  
They are not alone in that. The Karstarks, too, are besieged but not stormed. The clans of the Grey Mountains are covered by the cold and the darkness as the Others pass them by, but are not rooted out of their mountain strongholds.  
  
Disregarding all else, the Others march for Winterfell, meaning to cut out the heart of the north, destroy the bulk of its armies and reduce it to a scattered, disorganised rabble in a single stroke.  
  
Lord Rickard refuses to flee. Boldly he stays to defend his home as the white tide rolls in. By now the lands around Winterfell have been fully mustered; simply by geography, Winterfell had more warning than Last Hearth. Not only the men who would be called to arms in a war among mankind, but many times more than that—everyone who can hold a spear or a torch, however poorly. The Others’ single-minded march to Winterfell has been so fast that many of his more distant vassals have not been able to reinforce him, but Winterfell is a strong castle, and now its defenders are great indeed in number. For the northmen know well that they face no mortal conqueror. If they lose this war, every man, woman and child in the north will be slaughtered.  
  
Night closes in, and the sun vanishes from the skies of Winterfell.  
  
The Starks are well stocked up with the necessities of war: food and water to survive on, firewood to survive the cold and darkness that come with the death of daytime, pitch and oil and torches and arrows to fight the army of the dead. (Men very rarely fight the Others themselves. Little and less is known of how to kill _them_ , for the ancient records of Castle Black have been lost to the enemy.) Tens of thousands of smallfolk are cramped inside the castle. Winterfell is no Harrenhal, and even if it were, under other circumstances this would be impractical, due to the large number of people rapidly eating through a castle’s food stores. But when facing the Others, any slain peasant will soon be fighting for the enemy, so keeping as many smallfolk alive as possible becomes an outright necessity. The northmen are afraid, of course—for who would not be?—but they stand proud and tall, ready to endure a long siege.  
  
They are not given one.  
  
The Others attempt to have their wights seize Winterfell by storm. Their immense army has been swollen to hundreds of thousands of wights by slaughtered villages and despoiled graveyards of the north. This army is thrown against the walls with as little care as a child might fling a hammer. The living defenders retaliate with fire-arrows and boiling oil and burning pitch, and even small pieces of furniture taken by the fleeing smallfolk from their abandoned homes and now set afire—whatever they can find that can be lit.  
  
And, incredibly, the wights are held back.  
  
Trying to seize a castle by storm places the wights at a disadvantage, because it forces lots of wights to come very close together. The greatest strength of the risen dead over the living is that a wight can endure a dozen blows that would kill a living man. But when the wights are very close to each other, their only true weakness—fire—allows hundreds of them to be destroyed at a time.  
  
The Children of Skadhi are anxious. Their stock of slaves is being badly eroded; they have lost tens of thousands of them here, without breaking through. And every moment the warm-blooded ones’ fortress of Winterfell holds out, defiant, against the main strength of the army of the dead gives more time for the rest of the north to rally.  
  
They decide that they have little choice. Warm-blooded slaves, inferior as they are, are insufficient for this task, critical to the reclamation of the world that Skadhi made for them. They must risk their own lofty selves.  
  
One day, the surrounding wights yet again advance against the walls of Winterfell. The living, clustered inside, throw fire to repel them.  
  
Fire gutters out and dies.  
  
The cold pierces like a knife. From the midst of hideous rotting flesh, impossibly beautiful figures, as pale as snow, come gliding out of the ranks of their servants. Some men and women weep from seeing them, so lovely is the sight. Most recognise them as the true enemy. Torches are thrown at them, fire-arrows, burning pitch, swords. They look weak, for they are slight and slender; yet all these fires fade, and even steel swords crack from the intensity of the cold.  
  
There are sounds like crackling ice. They are laughing.  
  
Masters of all that they survey, the lords of the Long Night walk sedately through the night that they have made. They are in no hurry. They can be seen by the flickering firelight of their foes, and the blue shine of their eyes, as calm and immovable as the distant stars. They are not angry. They are not afraid. They simply _are_ ; and they have come to bring death to the warm-blooded ones.  
  
The defenders of Winterfell comprehend what they are seeing, comprehend the horror… and fight on anyway.  
  
Fire rains from the skies; but wherever the Others are, the fire cannot be. Heat is sucked in by the gaping void of an unfathomable cold. They are far too few to fight the living all by themselves. They do not need to. The protection of their presence allows their wights to break through, free from the threat of fire. Inside their minds, the wights moan with dismay as the prospect of their enslavement ending recedes away and they continue to be forced to fight the living. Not a single sign of this appears in their actions. Their bodies are not their own.  
  
Northern lords lead the defence, most notably Lord Rickard Stark himself, his three sons Brandon, Eddard and Benjen and their sons. Sometimes they come close enough to an Other to reveal the weakness of the Others to Valyrian steel, but usually they do not; it takes chance for the tide of battle to bring a Valyrian-steel-wielding warrior face-to-face with an Other, instead of just another wight, and Valyrian steel no more kills a wight than ordinary steel. Unlike Others, wights cannot be killed; they are already dead; the only way to permanently put them down is to burn their corpses to ash.  
  
Theirs is valour that ought to echo with glory in the memory of man. But the walls have been breached. The wights now walk within, risen dead in their hundreds of thousands.  
  
Slowly but surely, Winterfell falls.  
  
The Others are utterly without mercy; the inhabitants of Winterfell—including Lord Rickard Stark, his three sons, their wives and their children—are butchered down to the last babe. When word reaches the rest of the north that the dead have moved on and Winterfell is no more, dismay grips the north. There is no Stark left to take command of the war. The lords of ice and darkness have lost many of their slaves, burnt to ash in the desperate struggle, and their host stands much diminished; but the army of the dead is still mighty, and can replenish its losses by further acts of slaughter in the north.  
  
The Children of Skadhi are aware that their work in the north is not yet done. They have won a great victory, but powerful enemy areas of command remain, notably a certain ‘Barrowton’, ‘Dreadfort’ and ‘White Harbour’. The latter seems a particularly promising target, to cut the warm-blooded ones’ resistance in two, between east and west. Over the wreckage of Winterfell—for the Children of Skadhi are not devoid of a concept of irritation, and so they force their miserable slaves to tear down the ancient castle that so vexed them, once they have killed every warm-blooded one inside—the army of the dead proceeds southward along the White Knife, heading for White Harbour. Daytime ends and does not return; the shroud of darkness follows them wherever they go.  
  
All hope seems lost, until a swanlike ship lands on the east shore of the north and out of it strides a man in shining armour, with one eye blue and the other black and glittering.  
  
Since the Others stopped their slow-crawl advance southward and began their headlong rush to Winterfell, they were no longer seizing every little village they saw. They prized speed over thoroughness, for fear that their previous slowness would allow the men of the north time to muster and organise an army too large to be beaten. Now their haste costs them. With unerring accuracy, never wrong in his guesses as to where they will be, the man in gleaming black armour seeks out the parties of surviving northern peasants wandering in the night, hunting for food and firewood. He gathers them together, forming great tribes out of the wreckage of civilisation, guided by a mysterious figure that he speaks of only as ‘my teacher’ or ‘the crow’. Not all the tribes that he finds are willing to join him, but few indeed are those that do not spread tales of what they have seen: a man who walks in the night without fear, not needing light to know where to go, as if he somehow already knows; a man who can set his sword aflame with naught but his own blood, and slays wights with that flaming sword; a champion of the weak and defenceless who appears wherever the need is greatest, asking for no reward, desiring only to defend mankind. Soon he becomes a living legend in the lands blighted by endless night, and though he claims no name for himself they give him one of their making: the Nightwalker.  
  
The Nightwalker wanders the north, slaying bands of wights wherever he goes, and gathering followers who see in him a hope that they have long been denied. Dozens turn to hundreds. Hundreds turn to thousands. And with thousands the Nightwalker leads a daring attack on the guarding forces that the Others have left behind at the northern castles they passed by during the rush to Winterfell.  
  
The host of the risen dead besieging the Karhold are not expecting an attack. Still, the moment the first wight is slain, the other wights are aware of it, due to the overbearing minds of their dread masters. They rush to get to grips with the foe… and they are cut down by a warrior with a sword that burns bright and hot as a furnace, fire born of magic from the spilling of greenseer’s blood.  
  
Sensing the greatest threat among their foes, the Others themselves emerge from the darkness, pale slender shadows with shining starlike eyes, beautiful and merciless as sunrise. A dozen of them surround the Nightwalker, laughing at the impudence of this warm-blooded one who thinks himself a match for them, voices like crackling ice. Cold-eyed, the Nightwalker faces them down. They lash out at him with their frozen swords…  
  
…and their swords shatter on the gleaming black scale armour of the Nightwalker. For his armour, like his sword, is of Valyrian steel, incredibly expensive, incredibly rare, taken from the Smoking Sea itself where few sail and none survive; and the dragonfire that is the memory of its making cannot be withstood, not even by the lords of the Long Night.  
  
With every Other he slays, a thousand wights drop like puppets whose strings have been cut.  
  
When word spreads that the one whom men call Nightwalker can single-handedly kill groups of Others, a spark of hope turns to an inferno.  
  
The Nightwalker sends out his emissaries, somehow knowing exactly where they must go, and tribes of lost survivors flock to the saviour with one blue, one black eye. He leads them to Last Hearth next, and the Umber garrison joins their rescuer along with the Karstarks. With well over twenty-thousand people at his back—‘people’, not ‘men’, for in this bleak place and time of endless night, women and children are expected to wield a spear if they have strength enough to lift it. With the relieved highborn lords and ladies among his followers now, the greenseer has to give a name. After a moment’s thought, he chooses ‘Urrathon’.  
  
Urrathon Nightwalker turns south, driving a hard pace, for Winterfell. His people arrive after the fall of Winterfell, not that they would have been able to prevent it even if they had not; they are far too few, still, to confront the full might of the army of the risen dead. But they harass the great dead host as it marches south to White Harbour.  
  
It is as if the north itself is rejecting the presence of the Others. Urrathon works fearsome magics of great and terrible power; he holds nothing back. The arrows of his hosts fly further and faster than they by rights ought to. Great storms delay and damage wight hosts. Even the birds and beasts of the north join in the fight against the dead, perhaps knowing that they, too, will not be spared. In each of many battles, hundreds of birds land, pick up objects that people have set on fire, and drop them over wight hosts, and ordinarily fearsome animals such as bears and direwolves placidly sit down and allow people to ride them to war. Urrathon Nightwalker himself is usually hunting the quarry that he alone can fight with a high chance of winning: the Others themselves. His servants help clear away the risen dead in his path, allowing him to find and kill the Others.  
  
The Children of Skadhi—lovely, graceful, superior, destined by the cold mother to rule the world—experience the sickening realisation that they are being hunted.  
  
For all their skill, they cannot find Urrathon. He always seems to know where they are—and, some whisper, not only where they are but where they _will be_ , too. He whispers to the heart-trees, conversing with one he only calls ‘the crow’, receiving no reply that other men can hear and yet carrying on the conversation, and when he emerges he seems to know exactly where the Others are and what they are going to do.  
  
Urrathon’s emissaries ride ahead of his host and reach White Harbour. His probing attacks have greatly slowed down the advance of the army of the dead, as the Others try to find ways for their wights to avoid the steady slaughter of the outlying formations on the edge of their army by a foe that always melts away before they can catch him with their main strength. The thick, impenetrable darkness that they themselves have created—that they _cannot help_ but create, for it is part of their nature—is no longer their ally; it means that even their best bird-wights find it hard to find Urrathon.  
  
Now his men come to rally those of the living who can yet see the light of day—not himself, for the brave army harassing the Others from behind their own lines would surely perish without a greenseer’s power to steer them clear of the counter-attacks of the army of the dead. He is a foreigner and a warlock with a queer, black, glittering eye, yet such is his reputation by this hour, the man who makes Others run in fear, that there are few who disobey him even from afar. Complete militarisation is among his commands. Every man, woman and child who can lift a spear is to wield one in battle; those who cannot will contribute however they can, whether it is by fletching arrows or stitching wounds. The risen dead use every single member of their population. The living can do no less, else the dead will surely triumph. The harvest? What of it? If the Others will, there will be no-one left to have a harvest. Everything else in every walk of life must be secondary to victory.  
  
At last the northmen meet in battle with the full strength of the army of the dead, on the river White Knife, a fair way north of White Harbour. Urrathon Nightwalker himself assumes command of the living. In their desperation, dropping all else for the sake of victory, the living have come to outnumber the army of the risen dead, and they have no shortage of flaming arrows. The Others are dispersed throughout the army, to protect their slaves from fire with their presence of unbearable cold; but Urrathon has also ordered that men must bear whatever scraps of dragonglass can be found. Many doubt the claim that this material can kill Others, for it is not as if Others are common enough for the idea to be easily tested, but he is obeyed.  
  
The battle opens with a flight of fire-arrows, setting swathes of wights aflame from a range that frankly should not be anywhere _near_ possible. It continues in that vein. The wights fight on, and on, and on. However, they are not limitless.  
  
Ordinary, living men and women may not be as magical and mighty as the Others, nor as hideously durable and nigh-indestructible as the wights. But they fight with courage in their hearts, and this is their world that the Others are trying to take, and there are an awful, awful lot of them.  
  
The lords of ice and darkness learn what it is like to be fought by an enemy that hates you and means to see every last one of you dead and is so numerous that there seems to be no end to them.  
  
By mortal courage of terrified people who have nothing left to lose, the hordes of the risen dead are put to rout.  
  
Some Others survive the Battle of the White Knife and try to flee. The northmen are in no mood to let them. Armed with fire and dragonglass, led by a figure in shining Valyrian steel who is a living nightmare in every Other’s heart, the northmen chase down and kill the lords of ice and darkness.  
  
The war is over. Daytime returns to the north. The Others have been defeated.  
  
Shattered and exhausted by the invasion and all its massacres, the surviving northern smallfolk return to their fields. They have a few moons to recover, until another invasion of an altogether different sort rocks the north.  
  
While the north fought wildlings and then Others, the War of the Trout Ascendant has been drawing to a close. Tywin Lannister and Robert Baratheon have died side-by-side, broken by the iron fist of the Trident. The Last Alliance has lost, and the kingdoms of Westeros are falling to their knees before the bloody-handed Lord of Riverrun. Lord Quellon Greyjoy’s ambitions of winning better lands for his people in the Reach by loyal service to a ‘green lander’ king, Robert Baratheon, are put to an end; the ironborn are expelled from the southwestern Reach where they have been attacking, and the Lord Reaper of Pyke himself dies at Edmure Tully’s blade in the Fourth Battle of Bandallon. His son and heir, Balon Greyjoy, is a man of a different mind. Balon does not like ‘green landers’ but is capable of a degree of respect, or at least a healthy fear, for those whom he deems mighty warriors; and Hoster the Queenmaker, conqueror of the crownlands, the stormlands, the Reach and the westerlands, is too terrible a figure to dare provoke. Balon is intent on carving out a kingdom, but he decides it would be prudent to choose an enemy who is not under Lord Hoster’s protection. Therefore the seaborne reavers of the iron islands make landfall in the north.  
  
The ironborn plan for the shock of their invasion to take the northmen by surprise; after all, the northmen do not know that they are coming. Moat Cailin is to be attacked by the Iron Fleet, led by King Balon’s brother Victarion Greyjoy. Raiders pillage Cape Kraken and the Stony Shore. But the greatest blow—planned and executed by Rodrik Greyjoy, Balon’s eldest son—is to be a daring raid at Barrowton, the second-greatest town in the north, in the opening days of the war. Prince Rodrik is to take a party of shallow-draught ships, not proper war galleys, that turn left from the Saltspear and sail up Redrock River, allowing the army to disembark a mere dozen miles from Barrowton. His army should fall upon the town before Lord Willam Dustin is aware the ironborn-northern war has started. The kraken flag will fly over Barrowton, House Dustin will be eradicated in a single stroke, and the self-crowned King of the Isles and the North will hold the strongest settlement in the western north.  
  
Unfortunately for Balon, it turns out to be rather difficult to attain total strategic surprise against a fully mature greenseer.  
  
‘Urrathon Nightwalker’ has foreseen the ironborn attack, and knew its details before Balon conceived them. And for reasons that have never become widely known, he has little love for Balon Greyjoy, and just as little for the ironborn, whom he regards as “ignorant dupes, blindly worshipping a remnant of the ancient world that would devour them if they ever found someone more competent than they are to awaken it”.  
  
The matter need not be dwelt on in much detail; but suffice to say, it does not go well.  
  
After the defeat of the Others, the northern lords look to a new figurehead to help rebuild the shattered remnants of their kingdom. Straight after the Battle of the White Knife, the war in the south is still ongoing, though near to its end, and it is clear that whoever wins the Battle of Longtable will not be strong enough to enforce their will upon the north. Lord Hoster the Queenmaker and Ser Brynden the Blackfish are men to be feared; they are also men far from here, and it is no easy task to assail Moat Cailin. Whether Queen Vis or the Last Alliance take it in the end, victory has been steep beyond belief, beyond nightmare, beyond description. More than a hundred thousand soldiers lie dead in the War of the Trout Ascendant—most of them in the land of ash and rot and charred bone that is called the Reach, few in the nigh-untouched riverlands—and for every soldier who fell in battle or skirmish or to the bloody flux at a camp, there are ten or twenty helpless smallfolk who perished in raids or starved to death because of armies’ ‘foraging’. And that is _before_ the Battle of Longtable. Moreover, the north and the south did not answer in each other’s respective hours of need. There is little inclination, on either side, to keep ties.  
  
Lords Karstark and Dustin put themselves up as candidates, citing their ancient heritage, but there can only be one true answer. One man holds the hearts and minds of the people in the north. That is a slim, handsome man with one blue eye and one black, a known warlock of no known birth who came from across the sea and struck fear into the hearts of the lords of ice and darkness and hope into the hearts of the living. Four times he is asked and thrice he denies it, but at last the man known as Urrathon Nightwalker accepts his almost universal acclamation as King in the North. He sees to the rehousing of many people displaced by the war and the return of peasants to fields wherever they can find them. A king must have a royal seat. Many others of the displaced are tasked with building a great tower of dark stone in the place of the Battle of the White Knife, where the Nightwalker turned back the Long Night. It is to be called Nightstower. Strangely, the size of the construction that needs to be done seems to grow every time the greenseer-king finds another group of homeless smallfolk who need some employment.  
  
A king also needs an heir, and soon the newly crowned King Urrathon is plied with ladies of fine and noble birth, seeking to be queen. Many of them are beautiful. He turns them all away, save one; and he wraps his black cloak gently around Serena Umber, daughter of Jon ‘Smalljon’ Umber and the long-vanished Lyanna Stark. The bride, granddaughter of the Greatjon, stands a full head taller than the groom. More to the point, Queen Serena is the last living grandchild of Rickard Stark, and she understands full well that this marriage is for the purpose of avoiding civil strife that may cause needless deaths in the future; but it is not without affection.  
  
The north, though subject to the Dragon Kings, does not join under the Fish Kings. Many say the united Westeros that Aegon the Conqueror forged was too large to be effectively ruled without dragons; it only carried on in the unsteady, creaking manner of an institution propelled by force of habit and nothing more. The Fish Kings reign over a smaller, more homogeneous realm, while the independent kingdoms of the iron islands, Dorne and the north go their own ways in the world.  
  
There is strife in times afterward, too; but is there not always? When is the era of which that cannot be said? In 302 AC, peace of exhaustion settles over Westeros, for the first time since a man of many weddings sought the woman of his dreams; and that is as good a place to end as any.  


* * *

The cool north wind whispered and sang in the new-laid stones of Nightstower. A man stood at a glassless window, hands gripping the hole in the wall, gazing to the south. A woman stood behind him, waiting. He knew she was there. She knew he knew. Yet he said nothing, and she said nothing. She was comfortable in their silences. She knew he would speak when he was ready to.  
  
At last, he spoke. “Serena.”  
  
“Euron.”  
  
He turned. A blue eye and a gleaming black one fell upon her, the stare of a conqueror, the stare of a king, the stare of a warlock who had fought the lords of ice and darkness and won.  
  
She was not afraid. “The messenger from White Harbour will arrive when he arrives,” she chided gently, placing a hand on his shoulder. It came up to her lower chest. “It is not healthy to stay here. You’ll catch a chill.”  
  
“I owe it.” His voice was sombre. “Whether it is peace or war she has for us. The least I can do is wait upon a letter, after all the woe that I’ve brought to the one that sent it.”  
  
“To the south?” That surprised her. “I know you dwell on your deeds, but I thought you said the south would fight a war no matter what you did, in every world you perceived.”  
  
“That is so,” he admitted, “though some were crueller than others… but no, not to the south. To the one that sent it. To Vis Tully.”  
  
“What of her?”  
  
“When I was a young man, younger than you, recently come into the full might of my powers to see through weirwood eyes across space and time and possibility, I perceived many things of a world that would have come to be if my teacher had first found me and taken me in hand half a dozen years later than he did. It was not a kind world. I… I would…” He shuddered. “I do not like to think of what I would have been. Mankind was saved, in the end, but at terrible cost. And a great part of that cost came from a war that broke out almost twenty years ago, caused by Vis’s father, Rhaegar Targaryen.”  
  
“There was no such war.”  
  
“No,” he agreed, “because I averted it. You see, much of the horror of that possible future came from me, from my other self that never was, and so I knew it was not bound to occur also in reality… but much of it did not. So much woe, more than I can say, arose from Prince Rhaegar’s decision to run away with your mother, Serena, because he believed he would sire upon her the saviour of the world.”  
  
Her eyes widened. Her thoughts were spinning. She had known before that her husband’s supernatural sight and sorcerous deeds spanned space and time, not confined to be in the same era that he lived in, but it was deeply strange to think that if not for his actions she would never have been born.  
  
“He did not,” he hastened to add. “His sister was key to the salvation of mankind. He was not. But he thought he was. So—” and he spoke with great bitterness now— “in the innocence of my youth, I bethought that I ought intervene, despite my teacher’s warnings about unforeseen consequences, and with my powers secure the future of mankind. I sent him a vision into my past, to show him one of the two _true_ saviours of the world-that-would-have-been—not his sister, for I feared he might see the resemblance and mistake her for his daughter, but a boy who looked nothing whatsoever like him, and the boy’s mother too, because she was not any of the ladies who were under consideration for Rhaegar’s hand in marriage. I showed him Brandon Stark—not the Brandon you know—and the mother, Catelyn Tully.”  
  
“And that’s why he married her,” she murmured.  
  
“That damnable fool ruined _everything_ ,” he spat in tones of supreme disgust. “He was never part of the prophecy in the slightest. All that _he_ sired was a mediocre Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch who got stabbed because he mishandled his own men, and then got turned into a wight by the Others. But he took the vision I sent him, a vision that had no mention of him, and he took it to mean that _he_ must be the pivot on which the world turns. I still do not understand how that man’s mind worked; I sent him the vision _specifically_ to show him _it was not him_ and _he took it to mean that it must be him!_ ” His hands were bleeding. In his anger he was clenching his fists so tight the nails had broken skin. “And so Rhaegar Targaryen prevented Brandon Stark’s birth—and his sister Daenerys’s, too, because of the early death of his father. Rhaegar was not destined to be king; he was destined to die at Robert Baratheon’s hand; but he became king nonetheless. For all the woe he brought to the realm, and all the woe he brought to his wife Catelyn and her daughters, the blame by rights belongs to me. The war I had foreseen was put aside, but another war, greater and more terrible, arose in its place; and all the plans of myself and my teacher for the war that truly matters, the war against the enemies of life, were torn asunder.”  
  
“Yet the war that truly matters was won,” she said. “Your old plans may have failed, but your new plans worked. We defeated the Others in the end.”  
  
“We did,” he conceded, “but it could have been much easier. My teacher meant there to be two greenseers fighting for mankind, not just myself—yes, there was him, but he was old and dying, his powers weaker than they used to be—as well as the three dragons that Daenerys Targaryen was destined to awake from eggs of stone. Myself and Brandon would use our sorcery to help mankind, concealed in the shadows, while the dragons provided the brute force to tear through the armies of the risen dead. Instead I had to take matters into my own hands. The vision I sent to warn Rhaegar was my mistake, so it was my duty to fix it. I used my powers in the open, commanding the beasts of the earth, calling lightning from the sky… the Others were defeated, but at what cost? You’ve seen the people. They all but worship me. This is not the way. Greenseers are meant to guide mankind from the shadows, to help mankind to help itself, to help mankind grow wise and strong. We are not meant to rule as wizard-kings. For _me_ , to be King in the North… it is not my place.”  
  
“Of course it is your place,” she said, leaning down to kiss his brow. “You say you should not rule; I say you have ruled better than any other that I know of. You meant well—I know you well enough to know this must be so. Not wisely, perhaps, but well. You were trying to help people. Rhaegar the Whoremonger’s deeds are his shame, they are not your shame. He made his own choices. You can do things that other men cannot do, my love, but you are still a man; you don’t control all things.”  
  
“But I should have known better,” he murmured.  
  
“ _King Rhaegar_ should have known better,” she corrected him. “He was a man grown and a king. If even a king can’t be expected to be responsible for his own actions, what of the rest of us?”  
  
Her husband made no reply. She stepped closer. He gazed up into her eyes; of his own one was blue, one black, both solemn. He looked so young, scarce touched by time, without even a grey hair. It was times like this when she was reminded of how many lifetimes of age and pain weighed down upon him.  
  
“The regrets will be with me always,” he said.  
  
“I know. I’ve always known,” she told him, for this was true. “Yet the fate that you helped to make was not so ill for Vis Tully in the end, nor for the world you saved; and another fate may well have been crueller. Let that be a balm to your guilt. Whether she will give us peace or war, we’ll find out when the rider comes, bearing the message she sent to White Harbour. It can wait till morning.”  
  
She took him by the arm and steered him gently but firmly to their bed, for a warm night’s rest.


End file.
